Yeah they are, so if they did choose .ml for that reason they would have no problem admitting it also. So it’s pretty clear that they just wanted a free domain.

8-4, he’s an early bird. He gets so much more worms than those 9-5 dummies.

I’m not 100% sure what you meant, but that would actually be pretty awesome if China funded the development of free, open source, federated services like Lemmy. Imagine all that could be achieved.