That's not "literally advertising", that's an Easter egg, a very subtle hint or maybe even "coded language"

In any case, it requires the person encountering it to already have a concept of it and background knowledge to some degree.

This isn't the 90's/early 2000s anymore where there were only a few TLDs to go around, back then encountering .ml would have lead to a line of questioning like you say.

But not today, today the average user doesn't question the TLD anymore (as long as it's not one frequently associated with "scams" like .xyz) because there's just so many of them ranging from .io to .AI to .shop and .network

If I was proficient enough in Rust, I would have, or someone else would have long ago if it wasn't written in Rust

Rust isn't exactly a very popular language in open source right now due to its difficulty

The spread of Russian propaganda and misinformation is in large part the reason for a lot of the right-wing BS. There's been articles and documentation of their Misinformation campaign for at least a decade now

"Russia, shit military, fantastic intelligence service" ~A lemming comment I read once but can't find again

We should not be a party to it's continuing spread

It doesn't work, on Lemmy block is nothing more than a mute, and the instance "block" (mute) does not even affect the individual users of an instance, just hides the comms of that instance from your view

Lemmy's "block" still leaves you open to all manner of brigading that they've been known to do

And it still allows conspiracy theories, propaganda and misinformation to spread and fester and affect users who are unaware

They literally have articles over there spreading the Russian propaganda that Putin is justified in invading Ukraine because it's "full of Nazis"

Besides this is the Threadiverse, there will always be an instance with wide federation if you as an individual choose to open yourself up to that kind of "content"

Lol, Tankies just simp for authoritarian regimes like Russia and NK that claim to be communistic.

If you want to pull people to your political side, then you can do so without relying on misinformation and conspiracy theories. Which is unfortunately not what the admins of .ml have chosen to do.

Lol it's ok, they do things purposefully like that to an extent to get that result. Like if you go to Lemmygrad or Hex's homepage its quite clear you're somewhere weird that needs further investigation.

You go-to lemmy.mls homepage and it looks like a normal "privacy focused" instance. Until you innocently comment in support of Ukraine or something and find yourself being dunked on and banned for supporting a "Nazi regime"

.ml is the "bad actor" in this case for one, and for two, one of those tools is defederation. Nobody is talking about forcing .ml wholly offline.

Grad and hex are perfectly alive even with most of the network defederating from them.

We can actually talk about things without overwhelming censorship, strange algorithms, or ads.