Oh, found a post by the admin of that instance, it's from a week ago

its the default setting of every new instance to require approval, on my instance i dont require email verification so i thought i could at least have people write something to let me know they’re human. in the end no one uses my instance so I just opened it up, maybe after some registrations ill make it an application again.

Boy oh boy, @gaylord you're in for a fun time there, bud
48k users right now btw, he's getting a lot of bots

Anecdotally, I disagree with that characterization. Though, when you have the most people period, you do, somewhat intrinsically, tend to have the most of all "types" of people.

That said, I need convincing that lemmy.ml, who they are still federated to, has a meaningfully "nicer" community.

More accurately they defederated from lemmy.world due to "concerns" about it's open sign-ups policy and the potential for "abuse".

I think they mean that work has a filter that blocks *.ml (anything that ends in .ml)

.ml tends to be one of the most abused top level domains for malware, spam, etc (in terms of ratio of malicious to non malicious domains) similar to .top, .buzz, .club, etc. So, many DNS filters on company networks simply filter all domains of these TLDs (and maybe whitelist a few known good ones) since they tend to be almost certainly malicious.

I filter them on my home network too via pihole (though not .ml)

It's such an amazing system! Really impressing me and I plan to stay regardless of what Reddit does!

I'd be curious to see how they would implement something like this. I've come to accept the together but separate concept but it would be cool to have a consolidation of sorts!

IIRC it's hosted at Hetzner, and they have datacenters in Germany, Finland and the US. That could be the reason that the wrong flag is showing up.

There's a Finnish-run instance at https://sopuli.xyz/

(no affiliation, I just heard about it somewhere else)

Kbin user here. I didn't put much thought into which server I joined. Kbin sign-up was easy so here I am. It's cool that it doesn't really matter which server you're from!