Good job everyone blocking and boycotting .ml! It's having an effect, users are noticing and MAUs on their comms are falling!
And for anyone asking "Why are we boycotting/blocking lemmy.ml?" Here's a quick recap:
Lemmy.ml is an instance run by admins who are hardcore tankies and will enforce their ideology on their instance through various means from allowing (and pushing it themselves) propaganda (Such as Russia being justified in some way to invade Ukraine) and known propaganda outlets (Like RT) to removing content on their instance critical of their favored authoritarian regimes such as Russia or China and even banning users for such speech or speech critical of them if it's off their instance (Just like the Reddit mods of ol!).
If it was just some random instance it would have been defederated from long ago like the rest of the "Tankie Triad" (Hexbear and Lemmygrad), but they've positioned lemmy.ml as the "flagship" instance and abused that position and influence to become large enough to keep other instances from defederating from them.
Which I believe is harmful to the Lemmy-verse's overall growth and outside reputation. I have seen it come up before on Reddit threads (and other testimonials from people who came back and tried it again) that "They tried Lemmy but it was a bunch of tankies and went back to Reddit"
I don't know about you, but I'd prefer Lemmy to not end up with the reputation for being "Tankie Central " or even worse "Voat 2.0".
So if you haven't joined the boycott yet, join today and help us foster a better healthier Lemmy-verse!
You can take a look around here on !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works for documentation of it or checkout this list of curated documentation
I think both the Lemmy main developers @nutomic@lemmy.ml and @dessalines@lemmy.ml are also the ml Admins. There are other contributors but none of them is doing this as their main job.
Nutomic is also a massive transphobe who claimed that trans identity is western propaganda, and Dessalines is a massive cringe lord who drapes himself in the moniker of an actual freedom fighter to compare their struggle to the one he fights from his air conditioned computer chair.
I don't know, Dessalines was the resistance leader who destroyed French imperial rule of Haiti, and stopped slavery, however he pretty much immediately became a brutal autocrat that the majority of Haitians quickly came to revile.
Kinda sounds like it's in tune with their authoritarian takes on things. Not saying I don't see your point, of course, dessalines, little d, is a keyboard warrior
That makes it a challenge. If you defed from them, you might lose access to upstream patches, or beta features. I'd love for Mbin to become the standard-bearer for the threadiverse, but Lemmy has gotten name recognition.