MeanwhileOnGrad

There's a lot of clueless users though, it'd be good to have them join the rest of us outside that shithole

I think they really have no idea how unpopular their viewpoint is. If you ever go and look around at "Lemmy" based on how it looks when hosted on .ml or Hexbear, it looks pretty dramatically different. I think part of the reason the mods are so aggressive with this kind of censorship is that it creates a really surprisingly effective illusion that a lot of the world agrees with them. You can find off-instance communities where people post a counter-narrative if you search, but that's easy to write off as "the lib instances" or something. I think they have no idea how far in the minority they are.

The name for the cognitive bias involved is "what you see is all there is." Your brain doesn't take account of content which is hidden from you, so if 90% of what you see is pro-Russia, and everyone there is of the opinion that anything outside of that is weird Western propaganda and distorted and fake, it's pretty easy for your brain to run with it. And once you're in that box you have no idea that you're in the box. And also, a lot of propaganda frameworks like that are self-sustaining (describing any contrary information as deliberate lies or giving this huge emotional emphasis to reasons for discounting them, so it's really hard to bootstrap yourself out of the box.)

I'm not trying to make excuses for the people who are running the operation, I have to assume that they know better. Although, maybe not. Maybe they have some other kind of dysfunction and really think they are standing up against US imperialism or something. I do also think that professional troll farms are also involved in creating the impression, too. My point is, I think the average users may be genuinely confused by these events and see them very differently from the rest of Lemmy does.

He can't.

Unfortunately, lemmy only supports instance-agnostic links (like, that are written to link to a user's own home instance) to a community. It has no syntax permitting for this with links to posts or comments.

If you're using Firefox, you can install the Instance Assistant for Lemmy & Kbin, and it will modify pages on non-home instances to have a button in the right sidebar that will take you to the post on your home instance. With that, after you follow a link to a non-home-instance post, you can bounce to the corresponding post on your home instance.

I think both the Lemmy main developers @nutomic@lemmy.ml and @dessalines@lemmy.ml are also the ml Admins. There are other contributors but none of them is doing this as their main job.