I was uncomfortable with the fact that .ml was hosted in Malaysia
Not to discount your other points, but lemmy.ml isn't hosted in Malaysia. The .ml TLD is for Mali, a country in Africa. And the site is hosted by OVH, on servers in France.
Wow, thanks for that, I really thought .ml was Malaysia. While I had some mild concerns about Malaysia, isn't Mali a shit show as far as human rights? If the servers are in France, that mitigates a lot, but I think I have more concerns about Mali.
Mali has nothing to do with the instance though. Every country has a top level domain, like .CA or .UK etc. Most of them you have to pay to make a website using the domain. Mali is one country that lets anybody use the ML domain for free. That’s the only reason Lemmy.ml uses it, they have nothing to do with Mali else-wise. (Well there is the bit about ML = Marxist Leninist, but that is a bit of a backronym.)
The admins of .ml are tankies. The letters don't reference a place, they reference a couple of communist leaders who the admins are fans of. I'm surprised that more people aren't aware of that on this platform.
It is indeed a Mali domain, but of course people choose their domains because of their niche community - in case of .ml, it often stands for "Machine Learning". In this case I am pretty sure you are right and it is meant to represent " Marxist/Leninist" in this case, it is known that the instance admins are close to that ideology.
This is pretty much the same thought pattern I had, however I made my account here after Beehaw defederated and have since decided not to use it anymore. Lemmy.world reminds me so much of the older style internet and forums and it’s a breath of fresh air.
I'm not any authority, and I could be just ignorant, but my understanding is that the Malaysian government makes liberal use of laws against sedition and that govern communication to silence dissent. There was an artist who has been jailed a couple times this year for political satire. That kind of atmosphere doesn't seem like a good place to host communities that want free discussion.
That's a pretty valid reason, I'll have to look into it more as I already created an account on .ml. While I do call myself an anarchist/communist, I don't zealously jump at the defense of a government without nuancing the situation.
I knew that .ml stand for "Marxist-Lenninist" and now that I realize the other lem thought .ml meant it's being hosted in Malaysia I'm cracking up. That's a fun mishap.