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
Whichever instance you choose, someone will have complaints about it. Personally I don't have issues with .ml, but there are quite a few "tech"-oriented instances over which my trigger finger is itching on the site ban trigger.
It's all a question of which subset of human stupidity you're willing to deal with. Because all humans are stupid, we're just different in how and where we express it.
I'm not going to name them. The point of this isn't to expose which instances I dislike, but rather to show that every instance has its fans and its antifans.
Okay but while everything has its downsides... not equally so.
What if one day you were no longer allowed to discuss Linux? Or Teslas? Or whatever else the admins decided were now forbidden topics? Btw without telling you what those topics are. Also, if you even so much as accidentally mention the names of such, you lose access to the entire Fediverse from your account (on that instance).
It doesn't even matter what topic material the admins of lemmy.ml have decided to block - Russia, China, Ukraine, Uyghurs, Taiwan, North Korea, North Carolina, Israel, Palestine, Gaza, it doesn't matter. What matters is that they have set themselves up as the arbiters of "truth(iness)" and ban anyone from every community across the entire instance, even those they have never even heard of.
And then they dictate those rules - which again, are nowhere written down, plus not all that easy to guess at (let's see... the USA does genocide, but Russia does too? no wait, Russia can do no wrong - that's it! Oh shit, too late, already banned!:-P) - and hold all of the content on every community across the entire instance hostage to those rules.
I came here from Reddit to get away from such. Oopsie, it's here too.
Do whatever you want, ofc :-) I just hope that I explained this position well enough to convey that nuanced take that some actions are worth holding apart from others. This isn't merely a minor inconvenience imho - it's a major breach of the principles that many of us came here to support in the Fediverse, cited as being free and open source, except apparently the set of rules are not open to be read anywhere at all.
You know, before lecturing me you might want to check out which instance I'm coming in from.
I said "I don't have issues with .ml" ... but I'm not coming in from a .ml account. So when I say "I have no issues with .ml" it's in the context of the original question: do I refrain participating if the community is hosted on .ml.
One of my sentences there was a hypothetical written as if that were the case yes, but I did note that you were not from there, and the rest pertains to people trying to communicate with communities on that instance. Anyway, do whatever you want - I tried to offer an interesting counterexample but I'm not going to try to brow-beat you with anything. This isn't Reddit - we can leave those modes behind us, if we want.
My point is that there's nothing specifically objectionable about .ml (to me, obviously). There's many instances out there, after all, and all of them are at some risk or another form over- (or under-)zealous moderation. If a community is on .ml and seems to be valuable I'll go to it, unlike, say, a community on a hypothetical instance called youngnazisforfreedom.sieg.heil or whatever. If the moderation causes issues, I'll switch to a community (or make another community) on another instance.
THAT is to me the principle of the Fediverse: the ability to choose and to move on at need or will.