Yes, its become nasty there. My previous account was banned multiple times from .ml for making anti-russia comments like calling putin a dictator- or, heaven forbid, describing the hexbear instance as tankies! How deplorable of me, that is completely deserving of a 2 week ban while the posts calling everyone not supporting Putin fascist liberals and that Ukraine deserves to die with pig pooping butt stay up forever.
Lemmy.ml was never meant to be the main lemmy instance tbh. It existed as a testing bed for the devs that got way bigger than it ever intended to. It has survived so far on momentum but really should be excised from the general lemmy population along with hexbear, lemmygrad, and a couple others.
The sad part is, activity there is largely sanctioned by the devs themselves, as they themselves share many of these authoritarian views and are still officially admins of it. They act extremely power-trippy and its only growing exponentially worse as lemmy has become a going concern. A dev in particular even tried to get hardcoded profanity/"slur" filters added to the source code under the guise of "stopping racists" if that tells you anything how they really feel about their supposed support of freedom and open source causes. But it caused enough controversy that it got removed. Yeah, nothing is done in good faith there.
Everything makes me frequently question whether Lemmy really has a future or not. The behavior of the devs has prevented me from donating any kind of money to them- I don't donate to authoritarian crybabies, even if they write decent code. However, there just isn't any other activitypub service comparable to it, so here I stay. (No, Mastodon doesn't count. I hate Twitter style posts.)
I fully expect some lemmy.ml mod to wander in here and ban me from the instance for this comment, when it wasn't even made on their own instance. Won't be the first time and won't be the last.