Yeah that’s what I am starting to realize over the last couple of days - that while Reddit was bad, in some ways at least, they were less bad than Lemmy, or as you say at least lemmy.ml.

The key ingredient there is the transparency: Huffman may be a dick, but at least he is upfront about things: “you are landed gentry, under MY dominion, mu-wha-ha-ha now all will bow before me” indeed, but contrast that to claiming that lemmy.ml is for “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers.” - but did you get banned for spouting paid software? Or for violating privacy? No, or at least doubtful (I didn’t look:-). Look at the four rules - which ones did you break, that would warrant a site-wide ban? Some people get banned for none, e.g. for claiming that they have Uyghur family members staying with them who have experienced discrimination and potential genocide and… BAM, ban hammer. Bc neither Russia nor China can ever do any wrong - it is the USA that is “evil”, that is “capitalist”, and “democratic”, and “doing genocide”, but again, not precious Russia or China that does so.

I am looking heavily into alternatives that will allow banning lemmy.ml users across the Fediverse. One is lemmy.cafe, another is the Tesseract UI as implemented e.g. on dubvee.org, and another is Mbin (maybe, unless a bug no longer allows that? I saw one report of such anyway, but don’t have an account so cannot confirm), and I am leaning heavily towards joining PieFed, bc it’s so exciting what it is positioning itself to become in the future. Sublinks too but it never seems to be updating anymore, so I guess it’s stalled somehow.

Dessalines can do as he pleases. If we don’t like it, we can leave Lemmy. Those are our options.