Sadly, I had quite the list going, but upon blocking the instance, decided to clean up all the individual ones from that instance. Oops. Surely a "block" would imply some sort of... I dunno, "blocking" action, one might expect?
Also, at least on 0.19.3, I would not receive notifications from people on those instances. But now on 0.19.5, I do. So... there's that fun little tidbit of knowledge: what little blocking there used to be, has become less so over time.
Oh well, at least this way I get to read the most batshit insane replies to things and laugh at them. Once someone is aware, it's not really shocking, compared to a new user who would have no clue - e.g. they could be conversing with an actual PhD scientist on mander.xyz one moment and then somehow jump all the way to "no awkshually you should drink bleach, and follow up by drinking sunshine, bc (this one time at band camp?) I heard that kills the Rona". Which sounds enormously exaggerated I know, but just remember: there are people out there eating raw meat and drinking unpasteurized milk without a care in the world, even in the face of the avian flu situation that seems to have made its way into just about every animal on earth including extremely remote polar bears and such.
Disinformation, unlike misinformation that is more often simply a mistake, is often designed to be outright deadly, to the unprepared (though less for the sake of the actual deaths, and more for how they would then catapult the issue into the media to receive feed-forward attention).
Never underestimate the utility of a useful idiot, who will do it for free (tm).
Though I will add that the West also does a fantastic job, at making itself look bad:-). In large part by actually being thus:-).
Though also the West tends to be fairly open about that - e.g. here's a segment from the Wikipedia page for Christopher Columbus:
So our sins tend to be on full public view - Donald Trump's suing anyone who criticizes him in order to shut them up notwithstanding - while in contrast, try saying something like "the Tiananmen Square massacre happened", and see how fast you get banned from Lemmy.ml. They are not the same! (the badness of The West that acknowledges errors yet does nothing whatsoever to counteract them, vs. tankies who don't even seem to be aware of the simplest of basic facts!)
Anyway, be advised that we must stop this conversation here - the last time I even so much as questioned whether Dessalines was receiving money from the Chinese government (as someone said, which I included an exact URL to iirc) or the Russian one, to develop the Lemmy codebase (nothing necessarily nefarious there by itself - grants should be sought out, no?), my comments were removed. In fact, I only have 3 comments removed across the entire Fediverse for the past 10 months that I've had this account, and all 3 were removed for talking negatively about Lemmy.ml. i.e. this conversation is not on lemm.ee that welcomes a diversity of ideas - we are at risk right now of being removed just for what we've said so far. So, I guess, if you want to criticize them further, don't spend too much time typing it all out I suppose:-).