There are a lot of tanky posts coming from lemmy.ml. Their whole purpose seems to be to troll and spread their bullshit far and wide. They are nearly as bad as the alt-right. They argue in bad faith and celebrate authoritarian oppression. The beehaw mods might want to consider defederating.
I was at that same point back in November/December. Finally just defederated from
.ml
entirely and started blocking any agenda-pushing accounts in general, and wow, what a difference..ml
wasn’t as bad back when I first started on Lemmy during the Rexodus (most of that was all ongrad
), but it’s definitely become grad-lite since then. My guess is at least a portion of thegrad
crowd migrated over since it’s a commonly defederated instance.I kinda wish
.ml
wasn’t the official / de-facto flagship instance. I wonder how many people would have joined the Reddit-style corner of the Fediverse but were put off by.ml
thinking that’s what it’s all like.I’ve tried to recommend Beehaw to others, but I don’t think I’ve gotten a single bite. Because when they visit Beehaw, they also see content from the other parts of Lemmy – both posts and comments – that Beehaw still federates with, including .ml, and are turned off by a lot of it.
A big part of it is not understanding how the fediverse works, but that’s to be expected; it is confusing. But even having heard my explanation, they’re often still like, “Meh, I’ll just stick with reddit…” because, as you mentioned, first impressions are everything.