In an attempt to better understand Lemmy I’m wondering if some of you can shed a light on what the deal is between.ml and .world. The history, any significant event or a betrayal, how did we all run away from spez only to come here and throw mud at each other?

I’m sure it confuses a great deal of Reddit refugees who just signed up with the largest instance because of (in my case future proofing) reasons.

I’m wondering how this historic feud came to be and how I can be called a “Zionist” just because of my instance, and they are called “fascists” even though I’ve come across some pretty levelheaded people from that instance too.

Please, keep it civil!

I’m not trying to start a fight or mud slinging, it would be good if several people could say their piece and nobody shame or attack them for it no matter how much you disagree.

Thanks

Instances tend to be flavored towards certain groups of people. There are a particular group of 3 instances, one being Lemmy.ml the others known as hexbear and lemmygrad that cater to people who essentially think that all western society is corrupt and that NK, China, Russia, etc are the saviors of the world.

lemmy.ml happens to be the flagship instance of the software creators which causes a lot of friction in terms of if they should be cut off or not.

World and ML are two peas in a pod. The World moderators won't punish you for fighting with Tankies but they do monetarily support ML, and likewise ML developers own the Lemmy landing site which sends people to World.

My advice is to avoid Lemmy frontend whenever possible. Its maintainers are the owners of ML and really horrible Tankies, and most if not all instances who use Lemmy frontend support them directly.

For more info about that check out the the Documentation of Extremism Megathread from the !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works comm.

I know nothing about lemmy.world, but lemmy.ml and hexbear.net are filled with tankies (aka angry teenagers IMHO) and have been defederated with a lot of instances.

lemmy.ml is writing the original source code of Lemmy, but I don't remember any betrayal. Most users are not throwing mud, we mostly and politely ignore each other I guess.

(anyway, come to https://piefed.social/ instead because it's the best frontend!)

Schismogenesis: two groups that perceive themselves as rivals will tend to amplify and identify with whatever initial differences they have.

I don't think there is any organized feud, as such. A lot of instance population is actually self-selecting. Ideological instances are common. .ml happens to be one of the bigger ideological ones. Unfortunately, they tend to support authoritarian narratives coming out of countries that like to invade their neighbors. Lots of russian disinformation comes from that instance in particular.

Lemmy is strongly left-leaning and well you probably know the joke where two leftist enter a bar and 3 splinter groups come out.

My general advice is to instance block lemmy.ml and avoid the war in Palestine/Israel.

Lemmy.ml is the flagship instance of the authoritarian lemmy developers @nutomic@lemmy.ml and @dessalines@lemmy.ml and they unfortunately are not separating development and server administration. As Lemmy.ml is the oldest instance, many newbies think it is "the main Lemmy instance", way before they realize what the concept of federation means. ml's influence has weakened in the last years, but it's still influencing the discussion a lot. Check !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works to get an idea about ml.

For anyone wondering just what the hell a "tankie" is, as usual this article sums it up pretty well.

Is Piefed still using a hidden shadowban list?

In the beginning there was lemmy.ml only, BTW no one mentioned it but the dev choose .ml because "Marxism–Leninism". It is a far-left guy with far-left ideology.

When reddit blocked its APIs a few years ago, a lot of people went to "lemmy" and a lot of new instance were created, like lemmy.world, which is not far-left, so a lot of people joined it.

The world admins pay the Lemmy devs?

.world is less crazy/extremist than .ml generally.

still, the majority of the lemmy/fedi userbase skews far left idealism, and is 100% comfortable with extremist opinions of using violence and mass coercion and demonization of anyone who doesn't believe like they do. many users here also actively deny reality and history, if you take a more facts-based approach to life you're going to get targeted a lot here as an evil doer.

According to .ml you are Zionist unless you don't support the extermination of Israeli and Israelis. accord to .world you're a Zionist if you don't support the expulsion of Jewish people from Palestine and the dissolution of the Jewish state. both are pretty far-out there opinions, but again most users here are extremists or one flavor or another.

if you aren't a far-leftism foaming about the mouth about mass murder of your political opponents you're going ot find it trying to be here for long. unless you're just indifference to the hostility you will encounter, or systematically block people who tell you to die for having a different opinion or even acknowledge the existence of different opinions, than they hold.

Yeah, a lot of online communities are like that.

If you are here for fun, trolling people from .ml is both easy and invigorating, as they take themselves very serious, lack a sense of humor and get enraged about almost anything. I had great success with mentioning Palestine, Putin and I even got banned FOR LIFE from a community for defending the POLICE (hahaha 1:0 for me!) The discussions went on and on, you do need a skin as thick as a MAGA, but it is very rewarding… as thick as Putin’s butt after riding his bear I should say, to stay in my role. And they don’t use deodorant rumor has it.

When did that happen? I've only heard of that frontend UI doing that

i don't think it's so much a feud so much as .ml folks are much more hardcore and they actively proselytize their beliefs and .world users aren't as aggressive in that way. .ml is more active and .world is more reactive, at least in my experience.

generally you also won't get banned in a .world community for disagreement, you will absolutely get banned for any non-group think in a .ml community.

TIL

I’ve been here for a while, where did you catch these notions? I feel like there’s this Friday night after work drinks I’ve never been to, so I missed out on all the office gos.

I've been here for over three years. I left reddit in like '22, before it was cool to leave reddit.

it was a lot more chill a year or two ago, the reddit refugees who have come here recent have brought a lot of their toxicity and intolerance with them, and a lot of them have started a lot of communities where, like reddit today, the easiest way to get banned is disagreement with a moderator/admins personal opinions.

the easiest way to not have a terrible time here is to block incessently, and block entire instances where you can. i have about 5 instances blocked, and 100s of users blocked. it cuts down my content by like 70% probably, but I'm not interested in kind of content those communities/users post incessantly, which is mostly inflammatory rage bait and victimhood self-pity nonsense. and the personal harassment I get is fairly limited compared to when I dind't block .ml and a few other instances that are basically ideologically extremist.

There's no specific instance wide feud between the two or anything. At a high level, .world is just the biggest Lemmy server currently by MAU and .ml is just the oldest and flagship ones run by the main developers of the Lemmy software.

Now, the moderation philosophy between the two differs a fair bit, which is where the rivalries and the bad blood develops between users. On most general topics you'd see very little difference, but as soon as discussion touches the Russia-Ukraine conflict, anything negative about China, and the Israel-Palestine war, the mods on ml are aggressively one-sided in their moderation, and consider anything that goes against that perception as hate-speech against Russia/China/Palestine even if that's not what you are saying. If you want an illustrative example, look in the modlog at the 'nazi apologia' comment I was tempbanned from !memes@lemmy.ml for.

Still, as community and instance managers, that's their right. There's significant overlap between lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml where moderation is more overtly this way, and hexbear.net where users like to communicate with image macros more in ways that I think most other server members find annoying. Some on world don't like that so certain users crosspost discussions from ml communities onto world communities. Some users call the ml folks tankies for their disdain of violence committed everywhere except where committed by Russia, China and its allies. Some ml users (and many lemmygrad+hexbear users) call users on other servers libs for the converse reason, excusing or not pushing back hard enough on atrocities and oppression caused by Western governments. Some users like to generalize these characterizations to every user of an instance, it seems.

Aside from high profile defederations with ml or world and some servers for various reasons, refederations, redefederations between hexbear and other servers, there have not been any specific incidents that have caused .world and .ml to grow apart. I think it's fine to let each server have its space.

I’ve come across some pretty levelheaded people from that instance too

This was me (for some definition of level :D)

I joined .ml before I really understood the differences. Even once I realised the connotation, I didn't switch until I realised that !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works was blocked on that instance. That made me think about what instance I wanted to join (based on what communities I was most active in) and then I switched over here.

So, there are definitely a mix of people on each instance. It makes me sad when I see people jump to conclusions based on instance, although I also understand it if 90% of their experience is of a particular type of person.

.world is the generic reddit audience
.ml is tankies

The only reason I’m on .ml is because one of the communities I wanted to subscribe to was blocked on .world

I keep meaning to find another instance although as far as I can tell it hasn't limited my access to the communities I'm interested in (FLOSS software, technology and UK politics). Part of the inertia also comes from my experience on Mastodon which occasionally sees waves of server shutdowns when the costs become too much for individual admins to absorb. At least while the core contributers continue I can be reasonably certain the server will stay up.

Piefed.social and most piefed is created by a man baby that bans anyone that ask or criticizes his shitty decisions. Check numbers and you'll see that over the past several months Piefed has been slowly decreasing in daily active users.

The history is a bit confusing because the frontend scandal you’re referring to was for a frontend called “tesseract”, but piefed has also long had a questionable blacklist of phrases applied to screenshots and stuff using the Tesseract OCR toolkit. Piefed has been much more open about it than the frontend dev was, but it’s the same idea:

https://join.piefed.social/2026/08/04/anti-fascist-piefed-features/

I keep some lemmy.ml communities on my feed because it's refreshing to see news out of china that while likely propaganda, is at least not the usual flavor of propaganda.

Thank you for taking the time to write this

When I read other countries' propaganda, it makes me realize how much US ruling class propaganda passes through unnoticed

Its instance based and not hidden. Last time I checked(?) Its been a while since I dove into the source code. But anyone can.

Which community?

Thank you for defending Sting and sus muchachos.

.ml was my first instance. That account is 1 month older than this one. I found slrpnk by accident and it fit my community better so I switched. I learned about the drama after lol.

I hadn’t caught this blog post previously, thanks for sharing

In my opinion this is what kills the fediverse. When instances block other instances, you just fragment the whole thing.
I think what is needed is a Proxy. What do I mean with that? I can host a read only instance. This way I can control what instances I want to access and which I want to block, but this instance doesn't host accounts or posts. I would still need an account with a regular instance. The proxy instance would allow multiple accounts at the same time, so you don't need to worry about to change accounts or URLs, just to see a few other communities.

The whole federation thing is quite neat, but you need so much information beforehand, to choose your "right" community. Of course there are some very isolated instances, that do get blocked by most regular instances, but between the regular instances, there are quite some differences. For example some instances forbid NSFW. Hetzner (server hoster) does not allow NSFW in their ToS and a while back, a lot of instances used Hetzner. Some instances got surprised by that, because they didn't read the ToS.

Also I have the fear that when some governments could make the life worse for instances and make them accountable for other instances, that you can access through their instance. As an example could be the age verification, that some countries do require now.

Correct, before I moved to Piefed I confronted them about the donation banner the Lemmy devs ship with updates and the moderator on the Lemmy World support comm, in a round about way, admitted as much.

"So they’ve provided you a solution to your problem, but you don’t want to use it to solve your problem, and you’re mad at them because you’re still using the thing you don’t want to use.

Got it."

https://lemmy.world/post/40585627/21160546

What a one-sided, broad-sweeping view. 🤨

And they killed pugJesus!

Not everyone lives on Lemmy and/or lets internet drama live rent-free in their head. I’ve been on here a while and I’m only vaguely aware of inter-instance drama. I know everyone hates .ml, but like OP I’m not sure why. So, maybe, don’t be a dick?

I'd say that these days that group contains four instances and dbzer0 is a member.

Rational wiki is US Libertarian, far right. It is not a valid description.

"Tankie" is just the latest evolution of "pinko". It's a pejorative against communists. It's that simple.

You people are exhausting. What is authoritarian and please give examples of non-authoritarian states.

.ml is the old instance from before Reddit exodus and it's full of tankies and the weirdest takes you've ever seen (cue replies).

.world is the new popular instance.

That's about it. Some people read into it that ml users are upset that they are no longer the default instance and can't control the narrative. While world just doesn't care and keeps on trucking. Who knows.

🙌

Tankies are not just "angry teenagers" but in fact hostile advocates of militaristic dictatorships, many of whom are under their direct employ.

I find it's quite accurate.

Try going on a .world community and talking about the genocide of Palestinians then try going on a .ml community and try talking about the genocides of Ukraine and Uyghurs and get back to me.

Yes

We make an attempt at seeing things from invaded states' views.

If RationalWiki is "far right," the Pope is also a Buddhist.

The lemmy.world admins ask for donations to lemmy's developers and a chunk of that goes to running the .ml server.