When I first made an account I did it on Lemmy.ml because that's what I had heard some people talking about and didn't know it was one several Lemmy instances. I wasn't aware that ml stood for marxist-leninist, and switched over to the the other I knew about .world.

I can see the average joe joining the wrong place and seeing an echo chamber or an essential empty isolated instance then forming their opinions on the fediverse around that.

[–] Prior_Industry@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I thought they were using the ml domain as they were cheap / free ? Or am I missing the joke?

[–] FireTower@lemmy.world -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

From what I know they chose that specific domain because communists have a thing for Marx and Lenin (go figure). It might have been cheap/free but I'd imagine there's other cheap free domains they decided against in favor of .ml because of the connection.

[–] canis_majoris@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 year ago

It's also that ML was a very cheap domain because Mali (the country which the TLD belongs to) was not actively policing the use of the TLD until recently.

[–] MataVatnik@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

This entire time I was reading it as machine learning