Honestly, the sooner the bigger instances defederate from .ml, the better. It will suck to lose some of those comms, but pretty much all the major ones have replacements on other instances, and defederating from them will force people to go to those replacements.

I too, got the instance wide ban stick for saying .ml mods suck in one of their comms. I was being a dick and deserved the ban (from the comm not the whole instance IMO) for saying that, but with how much they abuse instance bans they deserve to be defederated. Can’t say anything even remotely negative about the mods/admins or disagree with their opinions without getting banned from tons of completely unrelated comms.

Let them stew in their own little circlejerk like hexbear. The wider lemmyverse would be better off for it.