Yes, but not really deliberately. I catch the instance ban hammer from their fragile admins so often I never get established in any of their comms

hell i went one step further and abandoned lemmy entirely for mbin

I generally don’t worry about communities. Either the community is well run or not.

Users, though. I’ll block trolls all day long. If I notice I’m blocking a whole bunch of users from the same instance, I’ll block the instance. So far that has only happened twice. Lemmygrad and feddit.ro.

Yes.

Lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net definitely.

Lemmy.ml has some less-bonkers communities, but [email protected] generates some of the most complaints, and I'm willing to paint with a broad brush on this one. There's only one community that I can think of that I regret not using and doesn't presently have a non-lemmy.ml alternative, and that's [email protected], and [email protected] has overlap. Also, aside from issues with instance policy, I think that lemmy.ml in particular is not a great instance for major communities, because it's the "dev" instance and Lemmy has had some serious periods of problems where stuff slipped through testing and led to major problems in new releases. Lemmy.world did not hit this, because the admins there are more-conservative about updating, held off until they were sure that new releases were solid. My own home instance at lemmy.today crashed into repeated serious problems with new releases, and the admin decided that in the future, he would also be more conservative about updates.

I also think that it's broader than disagreeing with someone. I'm not a furry or trans, for example, but I've no problem with pawb.social or lemmy.blahaj.zone and have never seen any complaints about moderation on those special-interest instances. However, there's an entire community, [email protected], that highlights a lot of moderation and infighting stuff that often I'd call pretty unreasonable off in .ml land. Beehaw.org is pretty left-wing, but they're pretty mellow and don't have the same issues (though they themselves have defederated with a number of major lemmy instances, including, most notably, lemmy.world).

That being said, a number of major lemmy instances have defederated with lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net, and I chose my home instance of lemmy.today specifically because it did not defederate with instances. I want to personally make the call on instance content and on users on an instance. I've only ever blocked one user, and they were just relentlessly spamming images in communities, and I've never blocked an instance. I normally just view communities by subscribed, look at a "whitelist" of communities, not "all" plus a blacklist, though.

EDIT: Oh, and [email protected] doesn't presently have an alternative, and I'd definitely participate in a non-.ml alternative.

Yes!

That instance just has a stink on it.

I'm sure there's some normal users or communities bit there's a lot who are just plain unpleasant to interact with.

Blocked instance... They can figure their stuff out without me because I don't want anything to do with them.

I've declined the opportunity to Mod a community on lemmy.ml, which is really not like me.

Yep. To a certain extent I don’t care what your political views are, but if you’re always trolling and putting them up in my face. And have no integrity rules wise, I’m blocking.

Well, I'm here and I don't know what you all are talking about. And this is sincere, truly don't understand what's the issue, could you point me to some of these controversial situations/discussions/measures?

I have a feeling that, if you ask for any specific instance, you'll get people complaining and blocking that instance for their own reasons. So, I'd let my users decide whether they block or not a user or a whole instance. For example, I don't like some of the communities in lemmy.world and I complain about it because it just feels the same as being in reddit, but having access to a different point of view is very valuable to me, so I don't block them.

I also have to add that I use lemmy with the voting system completely disabled. I hate the voting system because it shapes people's opinions to fit in some specific communities. This is why I think blocking instances should only be used as a last resort against things like blatant spam, boycotting, CP, hate speech and the likes.

I have fomo so I don't block anything. I'll downvote and move on if I see something that I feel needs a downvote

no, I'm subbed to many communities on .ml

Blocked the instance along with hexbear. So I think it would be good to drain the good communities from them if you can.

I have the instance blocked. Nice thing about Lemmy, you can vote with your attention. When toxic bubbles pop up, you can ignore them en masse. Any collateral blocking doesn’t bother me. [insert Nazi party meme]

That instance got blocked from me a while ago together with Hexbear and Lemmygrad.

yup, blocked that instance.

it's controlled by one or a very small group of people, and none of the rules are followed.

Certainly. I have the entire instance blocked as their moderation, admins, and plenty of the users I've interacted with are unpleasant. It's no Hexbear or Grad, but it's enough that my experience is better without their communities.

I try to share links to other instance’s communities if there’s similar ones that aren’t drastically smaller. This is because it’s very easy to be banned on many ml communities as has been documented and posted many times

Nah, IDGAF about it one way or another. You run into more jerks there than average, but that's about it, so as long as block lists function, it's all good

Personally, I don't. I get from your story that you seem to have been abusively banned, and from the comments that it doesn't seem like an isolate case. But while that might deter me from making an account there, or at most from having a community hosted there, it's not like anything bad comes to me from merely interacting with .ml content. The only servers worth blocking in my opinion are those full of spammers, or of content I'd personally hate to see in any situation.

No. I self-censor a bit there, and prefer other instances so I don't have to, though.