I love lemmy.ml

besides nazi content, the admins of lemmy.ml don’t decide what i can and can’t see via de-federation meanwhile the admins on lemmy.world and most other instances allow the same sort of brigading that reddit does to make content they don’t like go away into obscurity.

I think the most annoying thing about being in .ml is all the .world people who have like kneejerk reactions to anything you say and get hostile just because of your instance. I have used account on Lemmygrad, and Hexbear too. Lemmygrad was the most laid back and I really liked it but I wanted to dip my toes into wider lemmy (grad isn’t federated with a lot of the more reactionary instances, which i like and is valid but causes me to not see certain things). Lemmy.ml is more like a normal social media site. It has the reactionaries, the liberals, etc. A lot of the interactions are negative and confrontational. But its also got a lot more content in general.

I don’t use other social media from lemmy. Haven’t for years now. So this is like my 1 cig a week allegory. Where I let myself have a bit of the slop.

.ml is a leftist instance focussed on non-Western POV conversations. Mostly on the victims of Western imperialism.

Elsewhere on the internet it’s flooded with annoying people who believe their Western, primarily US based views should represent the entire world and will constantly tell you to adopt their political strategy which has seen tremendous succes over the past century (/s).

The US 'leftist’s favorite pastime is condensendingly yell at people to stop criticizing their favorite Democrat politician so they get healthcare at the cost of genociding Brown Untermenschen which they don’t care about because they’re Americans and anyone outside of the USA may be sacraficed.

They throw a large tantrum when confronted with the fact people outside of the West or those in the West now have internet access, or when there are people agreeing with them.

Here on .ml you can have anti imperialist conversations without being constantly yelled at by people who cannot fathom the world moving on from US imperialism in a different way than by voting Democrat harder.

I heard tall tales of “the tankie triad” when I first flew from reddit to lemmy.world (because it’s the largest, and back then as a baby leftist I just wanted reddit without reddit you know?). I kinda floated between dbzer0, .world and .ml for specific communities (and because I really didn’t understand how this works) for a while, but the more my understanding of Marxism and communism (and especially anti-imperialism) grew, the more I gravitated towards just the tankie triad. Now I mainly browse and engage on those.

I feel the largest issue between .worlders (and others) and .mlrs (and, more widely, between communists and non-communists) stems from that anti-imperialism, especially when it comes to our critical suport of modern Russia. We see the US-led western imperial hegemony to be the root-cause of all suffering on earth, and lend our critical support to states on the receiving end of that machine of violence even when those states are capitalistic themselves. NATO and the EU are also parts of this machine, and evidence shows these being the cause for the war in Ukraine. This evidence isn’t necessarily evident from the get-go, especially if one has grown up in said western states (the amount of deprogramming one must go through is massive, believe me). I’ve been trying to limit painting every .world user as a clueless lib whenever one comes in to the comments, but some .worlders like to uncharitably paint us as idiots who haven’t realized the USSR fell already.

idk, just my two cents

It’s one of the few actually leftist instances, as in having a principled anti-capitalist ideology, and many users are communists, viewing events through the lens of historical materialism instead of just feeling the vibes.

The “instance rivalry” stuff is just libs getting mad that we don’t have vibes based politics and prioritise historical facts over their knee jerk responses.

.ml is mostly fine. I picked it, because it gives me a good view of both Hexbear and Lemmygrad, because I like seeing what the lefty-side of Lemmy is up to (turns out its a lot more posts about Beans than you might expect), while also letting me see most of the mainstream of Lemmy, which has more of a traditional old-Reddit style culture, which is nice.

I enjoy politics posting, and discussion. But it’s nice seeing other kinds of stuff too, and .ml let’s me do both.

What annoys me, and this is a Lemmy-wide problem, is people making assumptions about other’s beliefs based soley on their instance of choice. It’s not helpful, it’s not generative, and it’s a waste of everyone’s time.

Like, I don’t think you should be getting hate, just because you’re a .world user. As long as you’re asking a question in good faith, and not being a shithead, I see no reason why you posing this here should be an issue ¯_(ツ)_/¯

When I joined, it was the only instance, but it was also useful that it was aggressively left-wing.

Before Lemmy, all the Reddit alternatives were Nazi bars, because everyone that got banned from Reddit congealed there. The Lemmy devs/admins banned anyone on sight who hinted at Nazi apologia and I don’t think Lemmy would exist today, if they didn’t.

But yeah, folks also assign way too much meaning to the instance. I don’t have to hold hands with my admins when I log onto lemmy.ml. I don’t have to agree with them. I barely interact with lemmy.ml users, because I just browse /all. And that generally looks the same as on other instances.
It’s just a way to access the wider threadiverse. If the lemmy.ml server is down, I log into my alt account on another instance and the experience is virtually indistinguishable, I just don’t have my block lists there…

One of the few places on the English language side of the internet where racial abuse against not sufficiently self hating Chinese people isn’t normalised.

After witnessing the downfall of Reddit, both because of enshittification and in the overall discourse, it felt silly to jump to another neoliberal community. I feel the same way about Blue Sky.

I don’t care about instance rivalries at all. Reddit refugees fleeing the dismal quagmire that is the inevitable result of capitalist social media and going to the place MLs created as a direct response to those conditions, then criticizing MLs, is kind of amusing but that’s all. I created a .world account first because I didn’t know the lay of the land then realized I didn’'t really feel like reading those same jokes, quips, puns, and slogans ad nauseum. I’m glad the architecture of lemmy allows me to choose a refuge where I don’t feel crazy. I regret it took me so long to find my people.

I appreciate you coming here and asking this question.

Most of the time I am not impacted by the instance rivalries because I largely browse by local instead of all. The only time I was affected by the instance rivalries is when a .world user started reposting all my photography over there, was messaging me about how he felt the admins were evil and he decided it was his purpose in life to bring down the admins and their instance and he was trying to rope me into it. I believe his name was cm0002

I chose .ml specifically because I wanted to be on a Marxist-Leninist instance, because .ml is maintained by Lemmy’s developers, and because most instances aren’t defederated from it so I have access to whatever content I wish to see. I actually just browse local 99% of the time since I find the content here plenty engaging on its own. It reminds me of the old forum days, before modern social media watered everything down. I particularly value being more exposed here to the perspectives of the global south, and non-USians generally. USians aren’t a majority of the world, so we shouldn’t expect our views to be normative.

it’s nice you don’t need to sign up with an E-mail address

it’s an instance that respects, upfronts, and promotes the anti imperialist, anti colonial, and anti capitalist voices of the global south. this i why most people (and by people i mean westerners or west aligned) get triggered by some of our administration policies, because it challenges the status quo of sillicon valley’s morals.

I just picked a big one and never thought about the user base