Profanity filters barely begins to scratch the surface of the heavy restrictions on lemmy.ml. The admins there are also well-known for banning people from not just communities but the entire instance if you criticize China, Russia, North Korea, etc., or certain leaders of such, or communist, etc. Imagine a Truth Social instance, except claiming to be leftist instead of right-wing - their way is the correct way and that’s final, dissent not allowed.

As it result, it has developed into quite the echo chamber. Not that that matters much to you bc you can access most communities across the entire Fediverse from there, or vice versa.

What may matter to you though is that many people, myself included, have user blocks in place (and lemmy.cafe has even defederated from it entirely) that prevents us from getting notifications from people on that instance. Blocking the big three instances (hexbear.net, Lemmygrad.ml, and lemmy.ml) cuts out >99% of the toxic crap coming our way, at the expense of conversations with innocent people who merely were not aware of the history of that instance and its relation to the Fediverse at large. I also lose out on a few larger communities that way but for me at least I consider it well worth the cost. So if you ever feel isolated, like people from other instances are ignoring what you say… it may be due to this effect, i.e. we may literally not even be aware that you replied to us at all.

So now you know.