I do want to thank them for vaccinating me from their ideology. Interacting with them made me realize that I'm a social democrat and not a full blown socialist

Not only that but they explicitly said years ago that they WANTED someone to go make a liberal instance for liberals to use and do their own thing. Which is what happened. Yet people continue to throw a fit that .ml maintains its policies. The entire point of lemmy is that you can choose the instance that works best for you! The entire reason many of the original people came to lemmy was that reddit banned Marxist-Leninist (what you would call "tankie") communities. And even many just vaguely leftist spaces. So people made their own thing where no one person controls what is allowed and what isn't. That's what federation is all about. If you don't like that there are instances that disagree with you on a fundamental level and ban you for your opinions then you don't actually understand what the point of federation is to begin with. I mean ML is in the name. What did you expect?

(edit to clarify I'm asking the OP not the commenter I am agreeing with the commenter.)

What is lemmy.ml?

Recently there seems to be some of misunderstanding what the lemmy.ml instance is about, especially from newer users.

Lemmy.ml has always been a niche site, and it will most likely stay this way. We don’t have any intentions to turn it into a mainstream instance, or set a goal of getting as many users as possible. Our goal is simple: make an instance that people like to use. I would say that we have been successful in this, but obviously it is impossible to satisfy everyone.

The reason for this is that @dessalines and I are paid to develop Lemmy, while donations from lemmy.ml users only make up a negligible part of our income. Besides, having more users would force us to spend more time moderating, and less time for development. Lemmy works quite differently from big tech sites like Reddit in this regard: while they get more money with each extra user through advertising, for us it is the opposite. So we would much rather have a smaller, non-toxic, and friendly userbase, than a large one.

Part of the problem might be that lemmy.ml is described as “flagship instance”, which can certainly be interpreted to mean “mainstream” or “general purpose”. I struggle to come up with a better, more accurate description. If you can think of one, please comment here.

If you dont like the way lemmy.ml works, thats okay. Federation exists exactly to solve that problem, let different groups have their own instances, with their own rules and political views. You can see the list of existing instances, and instructions for setting up a new one on join-lemmy.org.

In particular, I would like to see someone (or a group of people) create a mainstream, or liberal instance. That should help to avoid further drama, and avoid attempts to turn lemmy.ml into something that it is not. @dessalines and I would certainly be willing to help with any technical problems that such an instance runs into, and include it on join-lemmy.org (just like any other instance that meets the code of conduct).

Not from Voyager iirc, which also iirc is by far the most used third party app? Also, for multiple years that what is Lemmy.ml link did not work - it pointed to a post, which I think a later version of Lemmy.ml allowed communities to be made private, and then they never bothered to check what would happen for anyone not logged into a ML account, so it would just give like a 404 not found error for everyone else.

Agreed that it's not impossible to find out who they are - just that ML makes an exceedingly poor representation of the Threadiverse to people coming over here from Reddit. So when they see "death to the USA", and they are... you know, in the USA, they often nope right out and not only never come back, they spread the word to anyone who will listen that that is what "we" here who use Lemmy are.

Btw, in case you were not aware, we are a tankie bar (see: Paradox of Intolerance).

Also, despite all the curation they perform within their garden, they won't allow people to block the Lemmy.ml instance - so it's not entirely a walled garden so much as it is a delivery system for the messages shared by Lemmy.ml users.