So long as any active communities on .ml end up on the front page, they will inevitably draw attention away from less censored spaces. An interesting one is !comics which tends to rise and fall in popularity in inverse proportion to !comicstrips.
I agree that other communities have popped up to fill the same niches, so that’s step 1 and 2 done. Completely moving away from them, as OP intends, doesn’t seem like a plausible solution.