rather than leaving the platform, find or host yourself an instance that blocks the tankie instances... I'm loving sh.itjust.works so far, which blocks lemmygrad.ml - that's the beauty of federation

I consider myself a centrist. I think Leninists and Maoists both have good ideas. :)

the ml in lemmy.ml stands for Marxist-Leninist...

Keep politics in political subs.

no, that's lemmigrad.

Yeah, it's a bit of a conundrum. Lemmygrad is the most egregious part of it and easy to block thankfully.
But I agree with some of the other posters that lemmy.ml is still pretty bad in terms of what gets allowed and who gets modetated. Luckily, this still is not an unsolvable problem in a federated world. Of course lemmy.ml could also just be blocked, but many instances will probably be reluctant to do that, as it also hosts some of the bigger communities currently. But we can make an effort to prioritize non lemmy.ml communities over their counterpart, a different meme community over [email protected] etc, and if consensus is strong enough and enough communities shift, lemmy.ml could theoretically find itself in a position where it will have to clean up their moderation practices or risk wider defederation.

lemmy.ml is federated with most other instances (yes, including lemmygrad.ml). I would say the content on lemmy.ml is pretty indicative of the norm across the fediverse. my feed is diverse enough to remain interesting to me without many extreme examples of any sort.

various instances will have different vibes and different local content. find instances that you jive with and you are golden. if those instances generally play nice with the network at large, then their content will be available widely. if not, then just center your experience around the local content on those instances.

federation makes.the best of all worlds avaliable to you.

i mean its literally .ml so im not sure exactly what you were expecting? except for most of the reddfugees being directed there, the core demographic is tankies. just use an instance more alligned with your values instead; i use slrpnk.net because well im an Anarcho-Solarist.

and if the tankie content really impacts your enjoyment of lemmy, just block offending users or communities.

Is lemmy.ml just a tankie recruitment zone?

Yes. Check out the comments on this meta post. They ban people for "orientalism" and "sinophobia," meaning "talking poorly about China." I was banned because I criticised the Lemmy developer and owner of Lemmy.ml, Dessalines, for denying the Uyghur genocide. Check out the exchange below. You'll notice that many of the comments and users support China, claim no genocide is occurring, deny the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and even claim China is a democracy. Dessalines has been curating a communist community over there for years. He's just careful to hide that during signup.

That said, just because one instance is terrible doesn't mean all other instances are terrible. kbin.social is awesome. Lemmy.world is awesome. There are lots of instances you can interact with which have nothing to do with communism.

Well, I guess we should consider it as one of the trials of freedom. Either you live in a walled garden, or you have to be conscious about what you're interacting with and exercise critical thinking. If you don't want to be associated with genocide supporters - don't register on tankie instances, or even don't subscribe to any content from them. It should be a personal decision of every user (or instance maintainer for that matter - defederation is also an option, simply because instance maintainers are also people).
Another important thing is to speak up about it - to raise awareness, so to speak. It's perfectly reasonable to state what the worldview of tankie admins is - in threads like this, as well as on other platforms. I was considering lemmy.ml as Reddit replacement at first, but saw a comment on one of the Fediverse sites and digged more into this.

You can join /kbin. I joined kbin over Lemmy after researching the creators. From kbin, you can still interact with Lemmy instances but you won’t be on a platform owned by tankies.

As others have said, come join us in kbin land :) There are some other kbin instances listed here on the project website if you want to sign up on one other than the main instance: https://kbin.pub/en

I just opened up user registrations on mine yesterday so it hasn't been added to that page yet.

I say come give it a try! It's cool that kbin has lemmy + kbin + mastodon integration. Kind of a one stop hub for all the content. I'm hoping down the line we can get matrix integration and some other fediverse stuff.