The problem is .ml’s rules are inconsistent. Criticism against China is put under the rule “be respectful”, but you can criticise any other nation or group, except for maybe Hezbollah.
If they would just write it in the rules, like they did on their old PeerTube instance PeerTube.social, I wouldn’t mind.
To be fair I've seen the exact same treatment in mods and admins from other places. Just changing the subjects.
Just recently in a community I would not mention a mod started to straight up insulting me while pointing out how I was breaking the rules by not providing source for every word I wrote and the rules said that I must source my arguments. (Spoilers they didn't back up their claims either, and went into a breakruling name-calling streak just to top it). And it was not on .ml or anything related.
Yea, on .ml as long as you're in the in crowd you can say all pejoratives you want like "shitlib" and the most you'll (maybe) get is a 24 hour ban, but if you say tankie you'll get slapped with at least a 14 day ban