Instances tend to be flavored towards certain groups of people. There are a particular group of 3 instances, one being Lemmy.ml the others known as hexbear and lemmygrad that cater to people who essentially think that all western society is corrupt and that NK, China, Russia, etc are the saviors of the world.

lemmy.ml happens to be the flagship instance of the software creators which causes a lot of friction in terms of if they should be cut off or not.

I’ve come across some pretty levelheaded people from that instance too

This was me (for some definition of level :D)

I joined .ml before I really understood the differences. Even once I realised the connotation, I didn't switch until I realised that !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works was blocked on that instance. That made me think about what instance I wanted to join (based on what communities I was most active in) and then I switched over here.

So, there are definitely a mix of people on each instance. It makes me sad when I see people jump to conclusions based on instance, although I also understand it if 90% of their experience is of a particular type of person.

I keep some lemmy.ml communities on my feed because it's refreshing to see news out of china that while likely propaganda, is at least not the usual flavor of propaganda.

Lemmy is strongly left-leaning and well you probably know the joke where two leftist enter a bar and 3 splinter groups come out.

My general advice is to instance block lemmy.ml and avoid the war in Palestine/Israel.

Lemmy.ml is the flagship instance of the authoritarian lemmy developers @nutomic@lemmy.ml and @dessalines@lemmy.ml and they unfortunately are not separating development and server administration. As Lemmy.ml is the oldest instance, many newbies think it is "the main Lemmy instance", way before they realize what the concept of federation means. ml's influence has weakened in the last years, but it's still influencing the discussion a lot. Check !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works to get an idea about ml.

I don't think there is any organized feud, as such. A lot of instance population is actually self-selecting. Ideological instances are common. .ml happens to be one of the bigger ideological ones. Unfortunately, they tend to support authoritarian narratives coming out of countries that like to invade their neighbors. Lots of russian disinformation comes from that instance in particular.

For anyone wondering just what the hell a "tankie" is, as usual this article sums it up pretty well.

I know nothing about lemmy.world, but lemmy.ml and hexbear.net are filled with tankies (aka angry teenagers IMHO) and have been defederated with a lot of instances.

lemmy.ml is writing the original source code of Lemmy, but I don't remember any betrayal. Most users are not throwing mud, we mostly and politely ignore each other I guess.

(anyway, come to https://piefed.social/ instead because it's the best frontend!)

.world is the generic reddit audience .ml is tankies

There's no specific instance wide feud between the two or anything. At a high level, .world is just the biggest Lemmy server currently by MAU and .ml is just the oldest and flagship ones run by the main developers of the Lemmy software.

Now, the moderation philosophy between the two differs a fair bit, which is where the rivalries and the bad blood develops between users. On most general topics you'd see very little difference, but as soon as discussion touches the Russia-Ukraine conflict, anything negative about China, and the Israel-Palestine war, the mods on ml are aggressively one-sided in their moderation, and consider anything that goes against that perception as hate-speech against Russia/China/Palestine even if that's not what you are saying. If you want an illustrative example, look in the modlog at the 'nazi apologia' comment I was tempbanned from !memes@lemmy.ml for.

Still, as community and instance managers, that's their right. There's significant overlap between lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml where moderation is more overtly this way, and hexbear.net where users like to communicate with image macros more in ways that I think most other server members find annoying. Some on world don't like that so certain users crosspost discussions from ml communities onto world communities. Some users call the ml folks tankies for their disdain of violence committed everywhere except where committed by Russia, China and its allies. Some ml users (and many lemmygrad+hexbear users) call users on other servers libs for the converse reason, excusing or not pushing back hard enough on atrocities and oppression caused by Western governments. Some users like to generalize these characterizations to every user of an instance, it seems.

Aside from high profile defederations with ml or world and some servers for various reasons, refederations, redefederations between hexbear and other servers, there have not been any specific incidents that have caused .world and .ml to grow apart. I think it's fine to let each server have its space.

World and ML are two peas in a pod. The World moderators won't punish you for fighting with Tankies but they do monetarily support ML, and likewise ML developers own the Lemmy landing site which sends people to World.

My advice is to avoid Lemmy frontend whenever possible. Its maintainers are the owners of ML and really horrible Tankies, and most if not all instances who use Lemmy frontend support them directly.

For more info about that check out the the Documentation of Extremism Megathread from the !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works comm.

In the beginning there was lemmy.ml only, BTW no one mentioned it but the dev choose .ml because "Marxism–Leninism". It is a far-left guy with far-left ideology.

When reddit blocked its APIs a few years ago, a lot of people went to "lemmy" and a lot of new instance were created, like lemmy.world, which is not far-left, so a lot of people joined it.

Schismogenesis: two groups that perceive themselves as rivals will tend to amplify and identify with whatever initial differences they have.

I'm not trying to start a fight or mud slinging

You have an account 2 years old so either you are trying to start something or a complete moron.

If you are here for fun, trolling people from .ml is both easy and invigorating, as they take themselves very serious, lack a sense of humor and get enraged about almost anything. I had great success with mentioning Palestine, Putin and I even got banned FOR LIFE from a community for defending the POLICE (hahaha 1:0 for me!) The discussions went on and on, you do need a skin as thick as a MAGA, but it is very rewarding… as thick as Putin’s butt after riding his bear I should say, to stay in my role. And they don’t use deodorant rumor has it.

.world is less crazy/extremist than .ml generally.

still, the majority of the lemmy/fedi userbase skews far left idealism, and is 100% comfortable with extremist opinions of using violence and mass coercion and demonization of anyone who doesn't believe like they do. many users here also actively deny reality and history, if you take a more facts-based approach to life you're going to get targeted a lot here as an evil doer.

According to .ml you are Zionist unless you don't support the extermination of Israeli and Israelis. accord to .world you're a Zionist if you don't support the expulsion of Jewish people from Palestine and the dissolution of the Jewish state. both are pretty far-out there opinions, but again most users here are extremists or one flavor or another.

if you aren't a far-leftism foaming about the mouth about mass murder of your political opponents you're going ot find it trying to be here for long. unless you're just indifference to the hostility you will encounter, or systematically block people who tell you to die for having a different opinion or even acknowledge the existence of different opinions, than they hold.