I’ve noticed that there seems to be an emphasis on being extremely serious at all times, as if every single comment is a PhD dissertation being evaluated or something. There’s like this weird, subtle one upmanship about every little thing and a lot of people are very nitpicky and judgmental. It kind of takes the fun out of being on here, TBH. Or am I the only one experiencing this?
Lemmy is rather small, you might be bumping into the same 3 users everywhere.
Sorry about that, I’ll try to get my friend on here who’s nicer than me.
In the app I use I can “tag” people’s usernames and keep track of them across posts. It’s interesting to bump into “angry cyclist” being aggressive again about a completely random topic. It kind of puts it into perspective that it might just be how this person sees the world, especially if they’re very active and keep showing up. It feels very much like older forums where the same people keep turning up, which is something I didn’t realise I missed.
Just an extension to this, when I used Reddit, /r/all was too big and had a bunch of crap I didn’t care about, and I browsed my home page of subscribed communities.
On here I only ever browse All, despite the drawbacks. I think it’s practically the only way to use Lemmy. OP might have subscribed to a dozen communities and felt claustrophobic especially if they’re coming from Reddit.
Different instances are more or less insular though. Hexbear can be good fun but once you realize 95% of the posts and comments are from like 200 people it feels more like a discord server than a federated link aggregator. db0 federates with most big instances so even our local communities don’t feel as insular. .world is .world, for better and for worse.
Sounds about right. Outside of political threads, I’ve only noticed and tagged maybe three users that are truly toxic (as in they enter every conversation with an insult and devolve from there). The problem is that those users are active everywhere and make the Lemmyverse feel much less welcoming than it actually is.