there’s always going to be this stigma against .ml users due to how the .ml instance was formed and how the general userbase behaves.

the good news is that you are always free to switch instances if you find out that you dislike the instance you are currently on. while your posts, comments, and “karma” won’t transfer, you can transfer everything else such as the communities you follow, your settings, and your blocklist.

FWIW, I left .ml after about a year (and around a month ago) because there were just enough threads shit flinging and just enough posts like below, and just enough people who would dismiss any argument based on seeing .ml that it annoyed the shit out of me.

Not for how anyone at .ml ever treated me. (And FTR I’m not a communist)

So I’d say how much you worry about it is up to you, but switching instances is also pretty easy.

Please understand that plenty of us do not judge people based on instance at all. I genuinely don’t care.

didn’t you know that signing up for an instance is actually evidence of thoughtcrime?

Just drop them like it’s hot, lose nothing of value. There is probably an instance local to your nation or you can use .world which is a generic nonspecific Lemmy except they defederate from Hexbear and Lemmygrad because those instances spam so much bot content trying to convince users to off their families and neighbors.

Just remember that a lot of people on here also used to be the most annoying redditors. Their opinions are worthless.

Most of us don’t judge users but we are internally vocal about our own social challenges.

.ml is a big instances and people coming from the old web find such attractive, it feels like “the official one” we are well aware.

The have been attempts to advertise avoiding those but were not exactly a well coordinated organization.

Regardless the ideology of .ml and others big instances pose a problem in centralized power. Lemmy works best as many tiny servers organically building a network of content and ideas.

All of Lemmy is accessible as long as your instance is federated (almost all) however some may defederate from those problematic big ones, limiting the posts you can see.

You wont lose much by changing instance right now. There is no karma or rewards associated with your account. You can also make multiple on different instances with the same user name so you have a backup if your main instance goes down.

Don’t worry much about your instance. .ml is fine, but Lemmygrad.ml in particular is a very strange place. Have a look if you want to read what non-religious people hostile to the United States/West think. Sometimes they make good points but they’re such fundamentalist assholes about everything.

You’re not expected to know.

Just sign up somewhere else.

All accounts are throw away.

You can always move to another instance. The instance I joined first is very lovely but they’re a bit heavy on defederation, so half of the comments are unavailable. It’s actually very nice, but fomo is too strong with me. When I feel depressed by humanity, I switch back to that one again and feel better, not seeing all the bullshit.

It takes nothing to create a new Lemmy account. And there are tons of instances that don’t have authoritarian admins.

The core community is mainly holier-than-thou FOSS types, and you’re surprised that it’s insular?

you accidentally joined a gang of fascist supporting scum.

the answer is simple, join a different instance and abandon the pieces of shit.

of course you don’t have to, but when someone calls you a “scumbag fascist supporting simp”, don’t get mad.

Same

Damn it all. They didn’t disclose how I was supposed to behave during the sign up process.

JFC son this is not a roast this is a fucking napalm strike, god damn.

So, tankies? At first I got attracted by the leftist/communist/socialist branding of the instance, but at the time the concept of fediverse was too complex for me when I first registered there so I deleted my account. I’m glad I did, then lol, supporting Putin, Xi, Kim just because they are “the left” is like supporting Hitler just because he is “the right”.

So I’m 100% on board with most of what you said but… What on earth does ‘bitch-made’ mean? It’s setting off my women-hating red flags.

I googled it and scrolled down and got some garbage about a man raised by women, so I have concerns.

New user checking in, did you use the two asterisks or the pound sign?

hey look a post from a lib that’s so mad about internet forums not following the narrative that they can’t contain their homophobia and misogyny 📷

More of this weird mythological fearmongering. Absolutely nobody on any of those sites believe that Vladimir fucking Putin is a leftist. You are pulling this assertion straight from an uninformed ass.

That was beautifully put.

Socialism works in theory, but in practice they have not solved the problem of CIA death squads murdering their leaders and fomenting a coup.

this graphic is missing brazil in 1964 its missing literally every other country that isnt listed.

now that i think of it, it would probably be easier to list the countries the US didn’t destroy in central and south america.

Anyone who praises Xi Jingping, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and <insertAuthoritarianMurdererHere> as hard as I routinely see on lemmy.ml, hexbear, and lemmygrad is an awful person and deserves derision, contempt, and distrust. They can call themselves a “leftist”, “socialist”, “communist”, or a whatever-ist. Fundamentally, they’re edgelord bootlickers and temporarily inconvenienced dictators-in-waiting.

“wHaTaBoUt USA, iSrAeL, nAtO, etc.?”

You can hate “The West”, their people, their foreign policy, and their economics.

Doesn’t mean you should suck dictators’ dicks because they’re “not The West”.

Some of these events were egregious and deserve condemnation but tbh 56 “events” in the span of 59 years doesn’t seem all that bad. It’s not like they’ve conquered any of them. Even the Panama Canal was treated as working relationship and eventually the US pulled out of operating it.

US Military Bases are all over the world because those actually do stabilize the regions against outside threats. Without them, some of these smaller nations would not exist today.

I’m on ML because it is the dev’s instance, that’s it. Also, I dislike how .world is run.

Yeah, and them being trigger-happy with the ban hammer is why Lemmy exists at all today. All Reddit alternatives back then were Nazi hotpots, because pretty much only folks who got banned from Reddit joined the alternatives (and back then, Reddit moderation primarily concerned itself with Nazis).

They would show up on dev.lemmy.ml, too, and “just ask questions”, like if an immigrant did a certain crime, would you want them deported?
These questions served no point other than to drive the conversation tone to the right.
And yeah, I was glad that the admins were always vigilant about that and immediately banned anyone asking such ‘questions’, even if it may have thrown legitimately curious folks under the bus, because it allowed proper conversations to exist.

Of course, I have survivorship bias. I don’t concern myself with China or Russia nearly enough to have specific opinions about them.
But when someone is not being intentionally intolerant, I am of the opinion that talking to them is worth it and the only way to help center opinions which one might perceive as extreme.
But well, I also don’t concern myself with my admins nearly enough to have specific opinions about their opinions either. I don’t have to agree with everything they think, just because I’m on their instance, so I don’t care nearly as much as some other folks here.

Tankies aren’t real leftists. They’re morons who honor authority over freedom to the point they’ll suck off authoritarians from history. Basically (very, very basically), they’re the authoritarian “left”… as much as anyone who is rightly left honors undue authority…

Also a lot of people just join a random popular instance at the start before looking into political shit like this, and they don’t want to switch later on.

My words. We arent done justice

At this point I’m not sure if they are tankies, or whether they’ve just been called tankies by people who call all leftists tankies.