No, there are no instances whose communities I refuse to participate on. I have never blocked a community, user, or instance here.

I’ve blocked the instance quite a while ago. In the beginning I was just blocking communities, but the users spill everywhere unless you go nuclear.

No, because its nonsense tribalism. I haven’t seen any actual consistency in nonsense takes between any particular instances, with only a couple of extreme examples (explodingheads, grad, yddrasil, etc) that are already blocked or dehosted. ML has more socialists, because lemmy was a little leftist community project at first and it’s one of the oldest and biggest instances. Big instances also have a lot of idiots. World has a reputation for a lot of idiots, because it’s by far the biggest instance. That doesn’t mean everyone, or even most people, are idiots that are on the instance.

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

I would vote for moving it elsewhere. Maybe lemmy.zip would be a good instance that’s focused around tech and gaming. Or discuss.tchncs.de because !trucksim@discuss.tchncs.de and !diysimulators@discuss.tchncs.de are already hosted there.

Previously no. Now yes. Apparently got banned for inciting ‘peril’ against my own race because tankies don’t know the difference between ethnically Chinese and of Chinese nationality, and apparently you can’t criticize china in the forums. Throw in a few abusive individuals from the same instance shooting off the mouth and I pretty much said fuck it, I’m out.

Of course.

They banned me for calling Russia imperialist in one of their rant post, and claiming NATO was necessary because countries keep invading their neighbors.

Yep. Even if it’s larger, I’ll post in a smaller, non-ml. I don’t mind reading their stuff and them existing but with the seemingly random moderation shenanigans, I avoid it.

Yes.

Lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net definitely.

Lemmy.ml has some less-bonkers communities, but !worldnews@lemmy.ml generates some of the most complaints, and I’m willing to paint with a broad brush on this one. There’s only one community that I can think of that I regret not using and doesn’t presently have a non-lemmy.ml alternative, and that’s !mechanicalkeyboards@lemmy.ml, and !ergomechkeyboards@lemmy.world has overlap. Also, aside from issues with instance policy, I think that lemmy.ml in particular is not a great instance for major communities, because it’s the “dev” instance and Lemmy has had some serious periods of problems where stuff slipped through testing and led to major problems in new releases. Lemmy.world did not hit this, because the admins there are more-conservative about updating, held off until they were sure that new releases were solid. My own home instance at lemmy.today crashed into repeated serious problems with new releases, and the admin decided that in the future, he would also be more conservative about updates.

I also think that it’s broader than disagreeing with someone. I’m not a furry or trans, for example, but I’ve no problem with pawb.social or lemmy.blahaj.zone and have never seen any complaints about moderation on those special-interest instances. However, there’s an entire community, !MeanwhileOnGrad@sh.itjust.works, that highlights a lot of moderation and infighting stuff that often I’d call pretty unreasonable off in .ml land. Beehaw.org is pretty left-wing, but they’re pretty mellow and don’t have the same issues (though they themselves have defederated with a number of major lemmy instances, including, most notably, lemmy.world).

That being said, a number of major lemmy instances have defederated with lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net, and I chose my home instance of lemmy.today specifically because it did not defederate with instances. I want to personally make the call on instance content and on users on an instance. I’ve only ever blocked one user, and they were just relentlessly spamming images in communities, and I’ve never blocked an instance. I normally just view communities by subscribed, look at a “whitelist” of communities, not “all” plus a blacklist, though.

EDIT: Oh, and !kagi@lemmy.ml doesn’t presently have an alternative, and I’d definitely participate in a non-.ml alternative.

i tend to not even notice, usually picking a community by volume of subs and posting. its hard to keep up with the terrible modding in places as ive subbed to over 800 active communities in various instances. i dont block instances. at minimum, i want to see whats going on.

i dont recall specific issues with .ml but .world seems specifically egregious with its power trip modding, based on how ive been ‘reprimanded’… its amazing how they want to kill activity/enthusiasm in some subs that are desperate for content.

it feels like once an instance gets a solid level of user account churn, they feel they can do whatever to end users as there will just be more. its reddit all over again in places.

the power modding is somewhat shocking to me as the threadiverse really isnt all that large. i guess it doesnt take much for those people.

some of the only users ive silenced are mods

Instance blocked it. The mods are corrupt and actively shape conversation to align with their world view, without transparency.

It’s fine to disagree, and want respectful discourse, but it isn’t ok to use very vague sidebar rules to scour dissent

Yes. I find their gaming-chair leftism and obnoxious preachiness annoying enough to just avoid. My blocklist is filled with .ml users, and none of those were because of any political positions. It’s because they were annoying, whinging twats.

Blocked instance… They can figure their stuff out without me because I don’t want anything to do with them.

Blocked the instance along with hexbear. So I think it would be good to drain the good communities from them if you can.

Yes. I’ve had personal experience, many times, of over the top censorship and bans based on opposing views expressed in a mature and rational way. Once or twice is fine, but I’ve seen it more there than my entire combined experience online, it’s crazy and happens to often to ignore.

I’ve also seen a crazy amount of trolling there and it seems the trolls are protected through crazy censorship of anyone calling them out. It’s just not worth the aggravation.

I try to share links to other instance’s communities if there’s similar ones that aren’t drastically smaller. This is because it’s very easy to be banned on many ml communities as has been documented and posted many times