Curious to hear other thoughts about this, as I'm trying to keep !simracing@lemmy.ml active, but might suggest to move it elsewhere if a lot of people prefer not to interact with lemmy.ml communities
Lemmy.ml is the only instance block I have, after seeing too many illiberal shit takes, bad faith arguments and socialist astroturf posts.
My instance quickly defederated from HexBear and LemmyGrad which is just fine by me, it's helpful most of the bad eggs are concentrated in just a few places.
Do you might if I ask how you accomplished that - by using some app? Or did you just mean the standard Lemmy instance block, which blocks only communities hosted there but none of the users especially their comments everywhere across the Fediverse?
PieFed allows custom user instance blocks, of whatever instance you choose, and I think Mbin at least used to (although I also saw a bug report saying that it doesn't work right now). And Tesseract on dubvee.org and lemmy.cafe have specifically defederated from lemmy.ml, but I was curious what other methods would work as well.
Correct, just the communities. I still see .ml user posts and comments in other communities, which is tolerable. Plenty of them are fine. For the that aren't, the heckler's veto sometimes keeps the dumber narratives at bay.
I appreciate that instance labels carry some meaning of how a user is likely to act.
Yeah, that does help - e.g. if people started defederating lemmy.ml, then all the Hexbear users that went there after being defederated from many popular instances would make alts on other platforms and it would be much harder to avoid their continual trolling:-).
And yes I've previously had several quite pleasant conversations with people from lemmy.ml, though I have now managed to leave them behind by moving to PieFed.social where I can block the entire instance. I will block many innocent users that way but... I am okay with that, compared to the alternative of having to put up with each new one that comes along and harasses people. Many people of conscience are fleeing that instance anyway, and the rest have most definitely been warned so it's their choice, but I am not letting their recalcitrance dictate my own choices in turn:-).