Lemmy.ml is acting as a proxy instance for Hexbear and should be defederated by any instances that defederate from Hexbear
The mods of all the major communities there remove comments criticism Hexbear and usually follow it up with a ban. It's absolutely clear what is happening and it shouldn't be allowed to continue.
Lemmy.ml is not only a massive instance, it is also the original and core lemmy instance. Widespread defederation would be like a nuclear bomb to the lemmy platform.
Some people have developed alternatives in the threadiverse like kbin or piefed. If lemmy.ml is truly too far aflight for users to tolerate, it seems likely that alternative platforms will fill in the gaps. For now, lemmy is still a thriving and growing platform.
Widespread defederation has been the norm, though. It has always been a thing, and many threads exist going back and forth on mutual defederation for ages.
And also, the only reason I'm on Lemmy.world and not .ml is precisely because of their moderation and their community. I'm the example you're talking about.
I say bite the bullet and break the cord already. This is not the first or only thread calling for defederation of Lemmy.ml.
What I'm saying is that this is a unique instance. I also think that for my purposes, .world is a much better option, and I think that for most people, it's a much healthier and more stable place. I'm just not sure that the rest of lemmy can survive without .ml - It is literally where the development of the platform happens.
What do you do when you have defederated from the developers of the platform you're using? How do you have a working relationship to meet users needs? Someone will say just fork it, but that's essentially the same as launching a new platform. As I mentioned, others have done exactly that, partly for technical reasons relating to the vision of what the platform should be, but also for political reasons.
I'm not advocating for anything, i'm simply stating some of the realities of the platform we are using.
It's not thriving. The devs are prickly arseholes, which is anathema to building a cooperative, volunteer-driven dev community and the tone of many mainstream communities is obnoxiously set by tankies amd their alts.
It would've been me too, but when I started looking at Lemmy the dev's instance was closed along with many others, so the first one was Lemmy.world for me. While Lemmy.world has its flaws it's still way better than ml, really dodged a bullet there.
You might also be interested in checking out kbin, mbin, SubLinks (under development), or PieFed. they each emerged for the reasons we are talking about. They are all free to try and AFAIK interoperable with lemmy for the time being.