I'd argue that, for Lemmy, it depends on which communities you subscribe to. Even if you subscribed to one community that now has stuff you don't like, there's a decent chance that another community on another instance has what you're looking for.
I'm out of the loop but I've seen this stated many times now re: .ml. What's the deal with it? I thought it was mostly dev focused with memes and left-leaning stuff?
It's the instance owned and operated by the main Lemmy devs. Most instances are run by totally unaffiliated people using Lemmy software. .ml is the only one where you could say the software devs are also the community Admins and moderators.