Lemmy.ml is explicitly a Marxist Leninist instance of the Lemmy software. It's why it's called .ml. You can use a different instance if you aren't a Marxist Leninist. Lemmy.world is a Hitlerite instance.

Federation is censorship resistant, but each instance is still going to remove gross content for the sake of their users and instance culture. You can see removed content in the modlog, it's public for every instance running unmodified Lemmy.

As for why you need to copy/paste the sentence -- It sounds a lot like an anti-spam measure. Captchas and the like are extremely common, I'm surprised you find them novel. Are you asking this because you're planning a spam-attack and need to make sure the spam isn't removed? Your spam will be removed. While it's technically possible to go find, no one will care enough to do so.

Join us at lemm.ee. It’s as neutral as can be, the admin is cool, and they leave blocking to the users instead of just defederating outright.

There's plenty of censorship on Lemmy, but unlike Reddit, the censorship is orchestrated by the individual server, not by a corporation in control of the whole ecosystem. Go post something pro-capitalist on lemmy.ml, or something claiming climate change is a hoax on slrpnk.net, or something anti-trans on lemmy.blahaj.zone and see how fast it gets taken down - you could consider that censorship, but the reason Lemmy is better than Reddit in this regard is that you can go post that same thing on another instance, in a community that supports those views, and it'll stay up. It's all up to the administration of the individual instance.

Even if you can't find an instance / community that will espouse your unique views, you can create your own, and post whatever you like, and everyone who federates with you will be able to see it. That's how Lemmy is resistant to censorship.

I'm not touching the lemmy.ml question with a ten foot pole, someone else can field that one.

So um here's the thing.

The fediverse is a network of interconnected servers/instances that are independently hosted.

Within the fediverse, there's Lemmy

There are many different "servers" (I'm just gonna call it servers, instances is not a commonly used word) of Lemmy. Each have different owners. But they all run the Lemmy software of their servers.

The Lemmy software is an open source project, contributed by many different people who know how to code. The main developers believe in Marxism-Leninism, basically what countries like USSR and People's Republic of China claim to also follow this ideology (or at least they used to).

lemmy.ml is one of the first servers, run by the main developers.

So there, if you disagree with their ideology, you should probably use a different server.

I wonder if it will be somewhat better here.

If you host your own instance, you have complete control over what gets posted. If not, you have to follow your instance's rules.

one of the requirements being having to copy a sentence from the link provided which links to some article called "The Principles of Communism" which I thought was very odd for a site to do.

That's just basic bot detection, like a captcha. Karl Marx's works are out of copyright, and Lemmy's lead developer is a communist, hence the choice.

it's part of the sign-up process to almost pledge to some political or religious ideology.

In general, instances don't expect you to agree with their mods on politics or religion, but the content hosted on that instance would be somewhat biased towards the mods' tastes. So you go from lemmygrad (far-left) to lemmy.ml (centre-left) to lemm.ee (centrist) to shitjustworks (centre-right) to lemmy.world (right-wing). Personally I'd avoid the first and last, but it's up to each person to decide what's right for them.

The original developers of Lemmy are communists who were seeking to create a social media space that would be free from corporate censorship and centralization. When they created ml, they decided to have it be geared towards communists and leftists as their specific flavor of the Lemmy community, because that is what interested them.

If you are looking for a less political and more general instance, I’d recommend:

lemmy.world
sh.itjust.works
lemmy.dbzero.com

Thank you for posting, OP.

I was thinking about making an account here. Saw this and made one here, to see how the instance would feel like.

This seemed very sketchy to me.

👻 A spectre is haunting @Social_Discussion@lemm.ee ☭

Some of Ayn Rand’s earliest works are out of copyright now. Would that have made you more comfortable?