That’s why I said a reputation for, and a somewhat deserved one.

The key is that when .ml users are dickish away from their instance, it tends to be very obvious and easy to see. It’s the whole tankie militant thing. It stands out in part because it varies less between individual users, as compared to the dickish sorts on shitjustworks where it’s less consistent in type.

The censorship side of things is inconsistent. Depends on the specific community, imo. Some of them are just ridiculous about it, others it doesn’t even happen. But, because it’s a tankie instance, the censorship has a pattern to it that’s easy to notice and track.

But both do exist. Whether or not it’s worse than any other instances, I can’t confidently reach a conclusion because it would take digging through the mod log going back years to show censorship patterns, and even then you’d have to have a way to determine what was censorship and what was just moderation along community rules (regardless of the fairness or equality of those rules). Similarly, how do you quantify dickishness? How are you going to compare between instances? I have zero way to do that.

But I would maintain that the consistency of tankie diskishness and censorship there is very clear to anyone that interacts with the instance frequently, so it isn’t just a meme.