It will definetly hinder its growth. I hope the ml instance just gets mostly irrelevant when instances that allow for more free speech can grow accordingly. They might create a stronger cesspool of likemineded tankies but it hurts the overall platform

Yeah, I got banned from some random community there for suggesting that Russia wasn’t exactly the most privacy-friendly country. To be fair, this was after a lengthy discussion where I essentially suggested the mod had an unhealthy obsession with the main dev of a FOSS project (/c/privacy, and the project was GrapheneOS), but the reason they gave was for the comment about Russia.

It wasn’t an instance-wide ban, just a community ban, but that motivated me to unsub from enough of the lemmy.ml communities that I’m unlikely to get banned. And this wasn’t one of the big admins, just some power-hungry reddit-refugee that was disliked on Reddit for doing exactly the same thing (obsession with GrapheneOS dev, not the Russia thing).

Well, it’s the best they can do. They’d prefer to ding your social credit and throw you in a Gulag to work it off