MeanwhileOnGrad

In some way yes, and/or China.

You'd be astonished how many people went to Moscow just as "tourists", especially before the 2022 full scale invasion of Ukraine. And got favours, got baited, and so on. Tim Pool (one example just on top of my head) got millions of dollars, we know because he got caught.

The kremlin can literally spread dissent by paying thousands of dollars which is insanely cheap, and that's what they have always done so no "news" here.

They do it for the love of the game.

Or being paid by parties in the US who want to make "Communism" look bad.

I think that's the real source for a lot of tankie bullshit.

The Lemmy developers created .ml making it the "flagship" instance and giving it a high user count unrelated to it's politics. I've also seen some people express fear of some sort of retribution if they defederate from ml, but I personally think that's a bit overblown

A few have, but it's been brought up before

Some don't want to because it's a "flagship" instance and ther fore has many old comms on it (But on that note, it's only by subscriber count, which never goes down unless a user actually unsubscribes from a comm, so .ml memes might have 50k subscribers, but the absolute vast majority of that is gonna be dead, deleted and maybe even alt accounts, if we go by Monthly Active User metrics like off of lemmyverse.net you'll see that very very few .ml comms still beat their non-ml equivalent.)

Some don't because of fear of retribution from dessalines or at the very least "slow walking" of any issues that might come up, not likely to happen with smaller instances. But if you're as big as say .world, then that could be a potentially huge problem and would be the exact kind of instance dessalines would choose to flex this retribution on as a message.

Some don't because they prefer to have their users decide for themselves (e.g. dbzer0.com) or have an alternative such as lemmy.zip's default block which block the whole triad for new users. Which is fair, there should be instances on the Threadiverse that are unfiltered for uh "Politically thick skinned users" but they should not be put forth to prospective users from Threadiverse advocates looking to bring users from reddit.

And then there are some that do, infosec.pub and Lemmy.cafe are the 2 that come to mind, but I'm sure there are more

Some do. More should.

Many have.

There's a mirror for nearly every .ml comm of note, and in a lot of cases a few different mirrors across a bunch of instances.

For example, linux (in order of size) has !linux@lemmy.world and !linux@programming.dev and !linux@sh.itjust.works and !linux@sopuli.xyz and !linux@discuss.tchncs.de

I also crosspost all (good) .ml content to drive comm activity off .ml to non-ml equivalent comms and whenever I do encounter one that doesn't have a non-mo equivalent I make one

So lmk what .ml comms you peruse and I'll tell you the closest non-ml version or I'll make it myself if it has recent activity or you could also use Lemmyverse.net which is a fantastic tool for Threadiverse comm discovery

Be the change you want to see in the world.