I think that any accusations regarding their moderation policies or agitprop should be supported with actual, physical evidence, and not just personal accounts from individuals who claim to have had negative experiences. It’s lemmy. There’s a record of everything. Getting that evidence wouldn’t be difficult. Time consuming, maybe, but not difficult. That said, if we are banking on personal accounts, I’ve been on .ml for a while, and while I don’t comment in political threads, generally, I’ve seen little to nothing that coincides with what other users have said they’ve seen or experienced. I have an array of accounts across several major lemmy instances, and lemmy.ml seems…normal…banal even? There’s a lot of benign, largely apolitical communities there that are worth participating in. Saying “well, their political communities are terrible” is all well and good if that’s your opinion, but there is such a thing as throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Honestly, the ongoing discussion of defederation I keep seeing here and in places like lemmy.world comes across as ideological competition. If some instances, like lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, want to reproduce the same kind of vaguely liberal ideological soup that you find on reddit, that’s up to them. And that’s what it seems like is happening. I could be wrong about that, but lemmy.world comes across to me as a Fediverse Democrat stronghold. I’ve seen a lot of people there unironically defend things Joe Biden and the Democrats have done that are, from a leftist perspective, completely indefensible. And I have to wonder how many of the complaints about moderators abusing their authority are a result of people going into a Marxist space and pushing unwelcome liberal perspectives where they are obviously not wanted and suffering the consequences of those choices.

I suppose it’s probably a natural course of events that you’ll see instances defederating from one another as time goes on in order to produce the ideological echo chamber that generates the least amount of complaints from users. It’ll start with .ml, but I imagine eventually .world and .works will defederate from any instance still federated with .ml, like hexbears and blahaj. This will, of course, reduce the content and average user count across all instances, leading to people becoming progressively dissatisfied with lemmy instances that already had little discussion and content as they become virtual ghost towns, with people eventually abandoning lemmy and going back to reddit with their tail between their legs or some other godawful source of corporate-sanctioned content.

But part of what’s great about allowing self-determination in a profitless, federated network like ours is the choice of allowing said network to slowly wither and die for the sake of its users avoiding minor inconveniences, like having to interact with people they might disagree with in any capacity or suffering a temporary ban from a community.