That was my assumption too. My main account was on lemmy.ml and it was almost three months before I found out the “.ml” part apparently stood for “Marxist-Leninist”. This came as a surprise, as I hadn’t seen anything in the server espousing that, and Lemmygrad and Hexbear were seemed to attract the lion’s share of Leftists.
Same. I got brigaded in my first 24 hours because I corrected someone on a RUS/UKR disinfo comment they made. Nearly made me leave. I’ve blocked both instances in my client but I still occasionally see them pop up for some reason regardless of the alt account I’m on.