I saw this earlier in !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works and it's pretty bad. I'm in favor of defederation, at the very least to help cut some of .ml's network effect on the Fediverse. Since many of their communities are insanely large and they're also very well known for banning people for let's just say less than justified reasons. Nutomic's transphobia is really the last straw in my opinion. If people are interested in looking for alternative to popular .ml communities, !de_ml@lemmy.blahaj.zone is a good place to look.
I don't think anyone needs to stop using or break away from Lemmy like people say. Lemmy is open-source and can easily be forked. Lemmy's devs don't have the authority to deny people from using Lemmy either. Instances operate independent of them, and since many instances are already here and using Lemmy, switching to something completely different and incompatible would be extremely damaging.
That was really my whole point, since the databases aren't compatible. A switch from Lemmy to something else would reboot the instance completely. But also it's not necessary for instances that aren't lemmy.ml. Maybe some instances out there are loyal to .ml but that doesn't mean all of them are. This one certainly isn't and neither is my main one dbzer0.
That's good, I see a surprising amount of people saying that users and instance owners should switch to piefed or mbin over this as a form of "boycott" which I think is dumb because we don't have any onligation to give money to the devs, to support them, or even to federate with them. This instance banned nutomic for his transphobic rhetoric, and quokk.au defederates all of .ml as a whole.