Instances operated by pro-Russian or pro-BRIC individuals/groups that have no interest in dissenting opinion and often spill out into the rest of the fediverse posting anti-western propaganda.
Basically, it's flat Earth theory but for geopolitics. They believe the exact opposite of what everyone else does so they can have a tight-knit community devoted to being smugly superior to the sheeple.
Absolutely. Hexbear seems like the most insular and loud one of all. Lemmy.ml can be fairly normal sometimes, actually, just because it's the OG site and gets a lot of general traffic.
The rules are what each instance operator makes them (outside of breaking laws). It’s up to the other instance operators to defederate from instances that they don’t want direct sharing with for whatever reasons. So if lemmygrad wants to be anti-west, make anti-western posts, comment on current events and insinuate or blame the West for whatever, post trolling comments or fake news, that’s what will happen.
Even breaking laws could fare fine if they're unimportant enough. A child porn instance would have cops breaking down the server room door, but I'm pretty sure there's already piracy-friendly instances, and a shoplifting one can't be far behind.
A child porn instance would have cops breaking down the server room door
Burggit.moe does synthetic child porn, stuff like loli/shota material. That's First Amendment-protected in the US (and is apparently legal in the Netherlands, where the server says that it lives), but is illegal in a number of countries in the EU.
piracy-friendly instances
lemmy.dbzer0.com was created specifically to do piracy stuff, and is one of the major Threadiverse instances. And db0 himself has contributed a fair bit of software to improving Threadiverse infrastructure:
Thanks. I wanted to create a Lemmy account and this one seemed like the the most generic default one, huge user base, ran by the Lemmy devs, all right surely it's the safest, most non-controversial choice.