Truly a pretty terrible place for any kind of social activity.
People here are super self righteous and unwavering in their beliefs, quick to insult others and be generally bitchy, pedantic and quick to dogpile. Worst of all while still usually slightly wrong about a thing, but unwilling to hear it.
It’s basically the worst parts of reddit users where we have boiled it down to the most affluent or socially insecure.
Even if it’s as simple as a question people jump to defend their position with insults rather than answer it cause they get worried the person might be confused and it’s best to just make sure it’s a closed community as quick as possible.
This isn’t an open community it’s a private gated one where everyone jumped the fence and is scared that the wrong person might have come in with them.
Condescending is not welcoming.
Upvoting cause they are your in group isn’t community.
Berating outcasts cause you at least don’t feel like them is still bullying.
blocking the .ml instances helps, a lot. I made the recent mistake (twice!) commenting on Lemmy.ml. over there, anything NOT praising Russia, NK, or China is hated. they’re pretty smooth-brained and not worth arguing with. same with lemmygrad, same with hexbear. I’m fairly new to federation, and that was a big learning curve for me. a lot of the Europe or US based instances are way more open to hearing opinions and conversation, so I’d start there.
I’m not honestly fighting with .ml people. The people the most rude to me are .world.
I think they are just used as easy scapegoats cause they tend to be loud and passionate.
I can be in a memes thread and still have people argue in bad faith and call me a troll for asking a question about Linux. That’s not .ml or hexbear.
It’s also a third of the whole userbase, so definitely a higher number of every type of users, including toxic ones.
Oh dang… Well that somewhat explains the prevalence of their users.
Kinda a problem though that they then still blame other communities when they are Lemmy to a large degree.
If you want an idea of the split, filter this table by MAU (monthly active users): https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/