Soon after I joined Lemmy a few years ago, I searched for communities based on my interests and subscribed to the ones with the highest numbers of users to ensure they are active. Sometimes I joined multiple, but then saw that some people post the same thing to more than one, cluttering my feed, so I left the smaller ones.
It's only after my community ban from !games@hexbear.net for disagreeing about Ukraine that I was told about MeanwhileOnGrad, learning exactly what "the tankie triad" means and why big Lemmy instances have defederated from those. Lemmy.ml, where the ML probably stands for Marxist-Leninist, seems to have been defederated by fewer, possibly because it's run by the creator of Lemmy, Dessalines. Nevertheless, there is evidence of Dessalines holding the same authoritarian communist views as the rest.
Recently, there were two posts on !privacy@lemmy.ml about Signal, but then in both cases, admin davel (who is known on MoG for seeing CIA's hand in running Ukraine, among other things) and Dessalines linked (1, 2, 3) the same article by Dessalines, which not only argues Signal could be a CIA honeypot (as if it matters when proper e2ee is used), but also manages to shoehorn China even into that, claiming its government "prefers autonomy". This sort of portrayal of totalitarianism as sovereignty is the reason I unsubscribed from the community. As it has been said by others, ML is not a neutral instance but a means of pushing authoritarian views onto unsuspecting users.
Edit: Made the post title clearer.
Your life on the fediverse improves significantly if you just block the entire lemmy.ml and hexbear.net instances.
I hear a lot of negative talk about those instances, but rarely any specifics. What's the deal with them?
In my own experience, it's less that they spew out politics and more that they are just so defensive and argumentative. A lot of good lemmy communities are based on discussion and sharing cool stuff, while the denizens of those instances and the like are more online to debate, nitpick, and criticize. Like there could be a post of a dog picture and their comment would be critisizing the owner or introducing some political argument that is distantly related. Like bro, just enjoy the dog picture
This. I've seen a lot of obnoxious and/or argumentative comments from them, but one that stuck with me was when my first Lemmy instance had to close when Trump was inaugurated due to safety fears.
The first comment to the announcement post was a hexbear user saying something like "Yeah this is why capitalism doesn't work, America sucks and it needs to go down" -- which I do not disagree with, but the post was the admin sharing genuine fears and talking about the logistics of having to move to another state. The user didn't even say a "I'm sorry you have to close your instance because of this...", just straight up getting into politics when it wasn't the main point of the post.
(I will always miss you, possumpat.io; I hope the admin is safe and thriving!)
You touch on the problem with talking with them. You can agree on the problem, get into what can we do about it, they are no, you can't do anything except violently overthrow your government. Also fuck you and I hope you die, their attitude towards us. Some of them.
Yet if they talked that same talk in those worker paradises of China and Russia they would be committed to re-education camps and gulags.