I’m perfectly fine with just avoiding interactions with lemmy.ml communities
I would be fine with that too. If the instance was just tankie people talking tankie bullshit, like lemmygrad or hexbear, it would be easy to ignore. Unfortunately it’s not that simple.
The problem is that lemmy.ml has a more privileged status in the fediverse: being the first Lemmy instance in existence it still holds quite a number of popular communities that are still frequented by people from the whole fediverse, and the tankies wield their power there as well. Like literally: make a disliked comment on /c/memes and you get banned from /c/Technology, /c/linux, /c/Progammer Humor, /c/Mechanical Keyboards,… and all your other favorite communities on lemmy.ml as well. This actually happened to me.
A second issue is that the mods make efforts to hide the censorship that they are doing, because they know it’s not a good look. If you examine the modlog over there you’ll see that the first half of the page is like a day’s worth of moderation activities, and the second half covers 4 years. So where’s the rest? The many controversial comment removals and bans that happened a few days ago on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre, and who knows what else, have all been disappeared.
So yes, I think it is very important that people are being made aware of this and I also think a concerted effort should be made to move bona fide communities away from an instance ruled by bad faith actors.