Okay but while everything has its downsides… not equally so.

What if one day you were no longer allowed to discuss Linux? Or Teslas? Or whatever else the admins decided were now forbidden topics? Btw without telling you what those topics are. Also, if you even so much as accidentally mention the names of such, you lose access to the entire Fediverse from your account (on that instance).

It doesn’t even matter what topic material the admins of lemmy.ml have decided to block - Russia, China, Ukraine, Uyghurs, Taiwan, North Korea, North Carolina, Israel, Palestine, Gaza, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that they have set themselves up as the arbiters of “truth(iness)” and ban anyone from every community across the entire instance, even those they have never even heard of.

And then they dictate those rules - which again, are nowhere written down, plus not all that easy to guess at (let’s see… the USA does genocide, but Russia does too? no wait, Russia can do no wrong - that’s it! Oh shit, too late, already banned!:-P) - and hold all of the content on every community across the entire instance hostage to those rules.

I came here from Reddit to get away from such. Oopsie, it’s here too.

Do whatever you want, ofc :-) I just hope that I explained this position well enough to convey that nuanced take that some actions are worth holding apart from others. This isn’t merely a minor inconvenience imho - it’s a major breach of the principles that many of us came here to support in the Fediverse, cited as being free and open source, except apparently the set of rules are not open to be read anywhere at all.

but there are quite a few “tech”-oriented instances over which my trigger finger is itching on the site ban trigger.

Which ones? Lemmy.zip, lemdro.id, programming.dev?