Asklemmy

The .ml admins (and devs of Lemmy the software) are from that crowd, basically. If you don't like it, try another instance.

Edit: .ml is for Marxist-Leninist, even. There's no connection to Mali.

Welcome. Admins and mods of every instance, not just ml are very trigger happy to enforce their opinion. Going as far as fully disabling users accounts. Not by using an automatic word filter though.

Each instance has different political opinions you need to agree with. This one likes communism. Upside is no email verification required, so it is very private.

Lemmy is much more wild west than moden Reddit. Similar to old Reddit. Enjoy the ride.

Filters out conservatives pretty well and stops bots because it requires the user to read.

I wonder if it will be somewhat better here.

If you host your own instance, you have complete control over what gets posted. If not, you have to follow your instance's rules.

one of the requirements being having to copy a sentence from the link provided which links to some article called "The Principles of Communism" which I thought was very odd for a site to do.

That's just basic bot detection, like a captcha. Karl Marx's works are out of copyright, and Lemmy's lead developer is a communist, hence the choice.

it's part of the sign-up process to almost pledge to some political or religious ideology.

In general, instances don't expect you to agree with their mods on politics or religion, but the content hosted on that instance would be somewhat biased towards the mods' tastes. So you go from lemmygrad (far-left) to lemmy.ml (centre-left) to lemm.ee (centrist) to shitjustworks (centre-right) to lemmy.world (right-wing). Personally I'd avoid the first and last, but it's up to each person to decide what's right for them.

This seemed very sketchy to me.

👻 A spectre is haunting @Social_Discussion@lemm.ee ☭

Some of Ayn Rand’s earliest works are out of copyright now. Would that have made you more comfortable?