Just blocked lemmy.ml from my Lemmy account, and I swear to god it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done on this platform. My homepage feels actually clean now.
For the past few months I’d been seeing a lot of tankie posting and pretty much far-left propaganda on my feed. It got tiring enough that I finally checked my blocked-user list, and realized pretty much everyone I’d blocked was from lemmy.ml. So I just blocked the whole instance instead.
Saying this as someone who considers themselves a leftist: I used to think Lemmy itself was an echo chamber. Turns out lemmy.ml was the problem the entire time. Probably the reason I tolerated it for so long is that I agreed with a lot of what they posted, but like an oversaturated meme, I’d had enough. Browsing the platform was starting to feel way too tiring instead of fun, which defeats the point of being here in the first place.
The breaking point was seeing some dude post a “meme” implying North Korea and China are basically communist utopias and that the West sucks. I mean, the West does suck, but come on - you’re saying North Korea is the ideal the West should strive for? What the hell…
Isn’t that only PieFed.zip, but not Lemmy.zip that has the default instance blocks? I am fairly certain that this is the case, but even so could still be wrong:-).
Tangentially, the transparency surrounding this issue is abysmal.
Oh, it is also remotely possible that simply nobody on that instance has signed up to those communities yet - it requires at least one local subscriber to pull in new content.
Another possibility is the admins having blocked the specific communities even if not the entire instance. There is no way to tell which these are, as the Lemmy devs decided to not expose that information to users (fwiw, neither does PieFed).