@Kasrean From my experience it's more like a soft censoring. But yea, censoring does exist. I've interacted with Lemmy (specially lemmy.ml initially, since it was the largest instance containing all the communities I needed) even before the Reddit exodus. Back then there were only a handful of people creating content and the narrative they were spinning was something along the line of Look how bad the West is! Now look at how great China is!. Not to mention, the same people are against supporting Ukraine.

The problem was that it was really easy to make anti-russian or anti-china (edit: or to be, somehow racist against these, only by criticizing their governments, although not the same was applied to the anti-US posts - it was totally okay to be anti-America) posts or comments (in mods' views) and you were usually banned for it. Nowadays, tho, the situation is changing, and they get a small dose of their own medicine, lol (but you can still see the comments of these guys, many of them downvoted tho).