I’ve heard people talking about e.g. not subscribing to lemmy.world communities (because they are the largest instance), and others like Lemmygrad seems to be defederated by quite many instances. But what about lemmy.ml? Should that instance and those communities also be avoided? The “issue” is that many large communities seem to be based on that instance. Like [email protected] and [email protected]
Other reasons to avoid, besides those already mentioned here, include that you will not be allowed to say things offhand about countries such as Russia or China or North Korea with your same account even in communities located on other instances. You either comply FULLY, even when elsewhere, or else you are banned from the entire instance. You can read more about such practices in communities like [email protected].
Also a lot of other “not extremists” have blocked that instance altogether, so besides having access to your community able to be yanked out from under you at any time (far more than usual I mean), you also will miss out on interactions with those other people. You will be willfully choosing to remain inside of that echo chamber, which is such to a significantly higher degree than the vast majority of Lemmy overall, and legitimately much higher than even Reddit (no joke, again, read for yourself the stories in that and other communities). Whereas if you choose a community not on Lemmy.ml, then you can still interact with people from that instance, just elsewhere.
Also, you could be told that the mod hopes to kill you someday. Sadly, I’m not joking there either (some selected quotes: "nono I don’t want to shoot for pointing that it’s a game, I want to shoot you because…”, and then later tripling down still further, e.g. stating “I hope you die soon.”).
See e.g. https://lemmy.world/post/22359447.