Nope. I participate everywhere in the lemmy fediverse I can and never really had any issues with mods yet, which is surprising as I don't hesitate to get into political arguments generally. Ive blocked users, but never an instance. I take everything on a community by community and user by user basis.

If there's an overlapping or related community on another instance, I'll avoid using the .ml version of that community

100% yes.
.ml generates most of the propaganda about my country I was complaining about in other post.
Just the fact that their admins also own grad speaks volumes.
It gets tiring having to be on the tolerant side while they can freely astrosurf backed and protected by their admins and devs... Just like the bots on reddit.

If only blocking the instance at user level also blocked the users it would be great.

I've blocked the instance entirely. I never see posts from their communities, though I am surprised to still see users from it. I thought it would block everything.

I've declined the opportunity to Mod a community on lemmy.ml, which is really not like me.

Curious to hear other thoughts about this, as I'm trying to keep [email protected] 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 [email protected] and [email protected] are already hosted there.

Yes, I block lemmy.ml communities when I notice them, just because I don't want to accidentally contribute anything to that instance. Some of the users are okay, but the admins are not.

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.

Absolutely.

I watch closely though.

Edit: Judging by my history, I missed it a couple times and participated

Certainly. I have the entire instance blocked as their moderation, admins, and plenty of the users I've interacted with are unpleasant. It's no Hexbear or Grad, but it's enough that my experience is better without their communities.

I block subs and users and that usually takes care of 99% of the bullshit

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

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

hell i went one step further and abandoned lemmy entirely for mbin

Well, I'm here and I don't know what you all are talking about. And this is sincere, truly don't understand what's the issue, could you point me to some of these controversial situations/discussions/measures?

I have a feeling that, if you ask for any specific instance, you'll get people complaining and blocking that instance for their own reasons. So, I'd let my users decide whether they block or not a user or a whole instance. For example, I don't like some of the communities in lemmy.world and I complain about it because it just feels the same as being in reddit, but having access to a different point of view is very valuable to me, so I don't block them.

I also have to add that I use lemmy with the voting system completely disabled. I hate the voting system because it shapes people's opinions to fit in some specific communities. This is why I think blocking instances should only be used as a last resort against things like blatant spam, boycotting, CP, hate speech and the likes.

No. I have blocked a few specific lemmy.ml communities but I don't generally avoid interacting with lemmy.ml.

There are other instances I have blocked completely (a certain grad).

Depends on the community and what has been posted. If it's something simple like AskLemmy and people aren't being super weird or preachy about communism or whatever, I don't find harm. I personally don't think I've had any bad experiences with them outside of the time I said I didn't trust a certain news outlet, which I cannot remember the name of.

100% I do not want anything to do with .ml

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

Yes!

That instance just has a stink on it.

I'm sure there's some normal users or communities bit there's a lot who are just plain unpleasant to interact with.

I prefer to support smaller instances, but don't have a problem with lemmy.ml specifically (whereas I do sometimes go out of my way to avoid lemmy.world)

Completely banned, I have zero interaction with them.

Nah, IDGAF about it one way or another. You run into more jerks there than average, but that's about it, so as long as block lists function, it's all good

I have fomo so I don't block anything. I'll downvote and move on if I see something that I feel needs a downvote

Yes.

Lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net definitely.

Lemmy.ml has some less-bonkers communities, but [email protected] 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 [email protected], and [email protected] 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, [email protected], 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 [email protected] doesn't presently have an alternative, and I'd definitely participate in a non-.ml alternative.

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

No. I self-censor a bit there, and prefer other instances so I don't have to, though.

Yep. To a certain extent I don’t care what your political views are, but if you’re always trolling and putting them up in my face. And have no integrity rules wise, I’m blocking.

no, I'm subbed to many communities on .ml

I have the instance blocked. Nice thing about Lemmy, you can vote with your attention. When toxic bubbles pop up, you can ignore them en masse. Any collateral blocking doesn’t bother me. [insert Nazi party meme]

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

That instance got blocked from me a while ago together with Hexbear and Lemmygrad.