Depends on the community and what has been posted. If it’s something simple like AskLemmy and people aren’t being super weird or preachy about communism or whatever, I don’t find harm. I personally don’t think I’ve had any bad experiences with them outside of the time I said I didn’t trust a certain news outlet, which I cannot remember the name of.

If the conversation is civil I’ll comment occasionally, but i don’t think I’d care if my instance defederated from them. They’re where a lot of tech related conversations are, sadly.

I think it’s generally best to host communities on politically neutral instances

Yes, I block lemmy.ml communities when I notice them, just because I don’t want to accidentally contribute anything to that instance. Some of the users are okay, but the admins are not.

While I have not blocked the instance (yet), I purposely try not to post anything on any community hosted there and rather look for alternatives. Sometimes it’s easier to comment and or post on an ml instance due to it being larger in user size such as the !privacy@lemmy.ml vs !privacy@lemmy.world.

Nah, IDGAF about it one way or another. You run into more jerks there than average, but that’s about it, so as long as block lists function, it’s all good

If there’s an overlapping or related community on another instance, I’ll avoid using the .ml version of that community

No. People complaining about ml are exaggerating.

Of course.

They banned me for calling Russia imperialist in one of their rant post, and claiming NATO was necessary because countries keep invading their neighbors.

I’ve blocked the instance entirely. I never see posts from their communities, though I am surprised to still see users from it. I thought it would block everything.

No. I self-censor a bit there, and prefer other instances so I don’t have to, though.

Well, I’m here and I don’t know what you all are talking about. And this is sincere, truly don’t understand what’s the issue, could you point me to some of these controversial situations/discussions/measures?

I have a feeling that, if you ask for any specific instance, you’ll get people complaining and blocking that instance for their own reasons. So, I’d let my users decide whether they block or not a user or a whole instance. For example, I don’t like some of the communities in lemmy.world and I complain about it because it just feels the same as being in reddit, but having access to a different point of view is very valuable to me, so I don’t block them.

I also have to add that I use lemmy with the voting system completely disabled. I hate the voting system because it shapes people’s opinions to fit in some specific communities. This is why I think blocking instances should only be used as a last resort against things like blatant spam, boycotting, CP, hate speech and the likes.

100% yes.
.ml generates most of the propaganda about my country I was complaining about in other post.
Just the fact that their admins also own grad speaks volumes.
It gets tiring having to be on the tolerant side while they can freely astrosurf backed and protected by their admins and devs… Just like the bots on reddit.

If only blocking the instance at user level also blocked the users it would be great.

Yes. I’ve had personal experience, many times, of over the top censorship and bans based on opposing views expressed in a mature and rational way. Once or twice is fine, but I’ve seen it more there than my entire combined experience online, it’s crazy and happens to often to ignore.

I’ve also seen a crazy amount of trolling there and it seems the trolls are protected through crazy censorship of anyone calling them out. It’s just not worth the aggravation.

Not exclusively, but I do think twice before posting to a community hosted there, and actively seek out alternatives if possible. The only two I haven’t found alternatives for are c/crows and c/freecad.