This has happened once before and they reversed it. But they said this last time too:
The discussions that have happened in various threads on Lemmy make it very clear that removing the communites before we announced our intent to remove them is not the level of transparency the community expects, and that as stewards of this community we need to be extremely transparent before we do this again in the future as well as make sure that we get feedback around what the planned changes are, because lemmy.world is yours as much as it is ours.
Yes I know a lot of people on .ml are not tankies but .ml admin is repeatedly banning anti tankie discussion. See my other comment above. Look at the modlogs and you’ll find people being banned for critical thinking. I blocked the instance because Lemmy <> lemmy.ml . The code can always be forked.
User accounts can be migrated to new instances with version 19