Currently there aren’t enough tools for small communities. It’s hard for a niche community to grow and flourish.

If you post something like ‘BBQ is delicious’, it becomes a open referendum for the entirety of Lemmy to tell you why everything you said is wrong. Everybody dog piles their own personal biases and issues. And that’s fine for a general discussion.

lemmy needs smaller community safe spaces so the conversations can grow by interested parties, that’s currently lacking. Like a subscriber only post, only seen by people who subscribe to a community. And then when it gets large enough, people can say I want this to be generally available. I think that would help a lot

Because it’s on the internet.

Lemmy seems less like a space built around a shared passion for ideas or a vision of a better future, and more like a community bonded by mutual hatred of an outgroup. The sense of belonging often comes not from shared goals or values, but from shared enemies. That kind of dynamic tends to breed a negative, hostile culture where outrage and mockery are more common than curiosity or constructive discussion.

While the communities you view may differ from my own experience, I would say that political and news themed communities have had an uptick in aggression.

My sense is that it is less about the overall population on Lemmy, but more about the polarization of news and political topics in our society. If there were truly a force actively trying to promote a culture war to prevent a class war, I’d say they are doing an effective job.

Outside of news/politics communities, postings, and (directly or indirectly) related comments (or commenters), I have not experienced an increase in outright negativity and rudeness.

Just like in any written dialogue, I think some expressions of humor can be written or received poorly, lending to a received sense of rudeness—and those moments sometimes serve as reinforcement of actual offensive aggression observed elsewhere, you dick /s.

Jokes aside, I do appreciate you drawing attention to it, as a reminder for each of us to do our part to express ourselves more clearly—allowing for discussion, disagreement, sarcasm, and humor while maintaining respect and civility.

And, of course, continue to block users and communities you find objectionable; though, I would challenge anyone to ask themselves if they are blocking to avoid offensive content, or are they blocking to avoid content which does not align with their views. Silencing different points of view, ultimately, only expedites the original problem.

As others have said, one’s view of Lemmy is highly dependent upon the instances and communities that one frequents. As someone who isn’t a habitué of politics, news, sport or meme communities, I’ve found my fellow lemmings to be pleasant, but I also believe that that is due to trying to be helpful and polite myself and being willing to apologize when warranted.

I only have this issue on political communities. Anger towards Americans is much more pronounced on Lemmy than on Reddit. People will call for violence a lot more frequently here than on Reddit.

I understand the anger towards Americans, but it can be downright toxic to organizing at times. I’m here because I want to discuss 50501 without censorship. A lot of people belittle my movement and call for riots.

Like, it’s not everybody. There’s good people. It’s just that morale is a precious thing to preserve. It’s so easily destroyed here. It’s exhausting.

I’ve seen it here as long as I’ve been here, it’s the main reason why I’m not on here much anymore. First time I noticed it was when I went looking for Christian communities here and found nearly every post was getting more downvotes than upvotes. Kinda seems like there are a few on this platform who enjoy downvoting people just for being Christians - and those people outnumber those interested in actual conversation on those communities.

So why is Lemmy like this? I dunno, I can only speculate.

Totally agree. People here are some of the worst I have ever seen. Like actually worse than Reddit. Easily. Pretty sure most people here are just miserable depressed fucks. Kinda makes sense honestly.

I get it too. People would rather start calling you names than have a discussion. I think it’s the “with us or against us” mentality as a whole that makes people very volatile.

You sound like a reasonable person though, so I hope you don’t depart.

I don’t see that much hate but plenty of anger

Won’t speculate as to why but will recommend the community push for keyword filtering at the account level (a la Bluesky) rather than relying on apps like Sync to help us sift through the garbage

I try to be more constructive and positive… you get what you give for the most part. There are trolls abound like any online platform but ignore, report and/or block them and move on with your day.

There is no one I seen here who even had expressed any passion towards anything really.

All/Top is mostly general posts, news and memes. There are a lot of smaller communities on Lemmy that are about people’s passions.

Is technology your passion (judging by your posts)? If so check out more specific communities on stuff like Android, Apple, retro computing, homeassistant, linux, windows, etc. If it’s something else chances are there’s a community for that (albeit it could be relatively inactive). The technology subs attract general discussion, so go for the niches.

with the enshittification of all other social media, the exodi and influx would be appropriate for this particular cartoon about little blobs being unwelcome, creating their own space, then being crowded out to the dialogue “oh no”…clear??

I browse 3-5 times a day, and see something unnecessarily rude maybe once a week or so. I’ve not noticed any change in rudeness or negativity recently.

Without hard data, mood trends identified on social media usually say more about the identifier than the community.

Once I replied to a meme and got 10 people replying with hateful things, downvoting my replies, nobody had my back did’nt understand why. Turned out the meme I replied to was posted in a communist instance and the anti-us sentiment wasn’t really a joke. At some point a mod blocked me from replying so I blocked the instance and never looked back. If I see a user or community from specific instances I think twice before I reply. 99% of the time I feel free to say whatever I want, so I don’t really care about the parts of lemmy where I’m not. I’ve seen plenty of passionate and caring people in the 2-3 weeks since I registered, so don’t know how you’ve missed them so far. They’re here though.

Americans are indoctrinated by their media and society to be segregated into political and social camps that have tribal wars with each other. That’s all priority no. 1 for them rn and it spills over.

It’s just people bickering about social and political issues like gender, misinterpretation of isms, social hierarchy, etc. But because Americans don’t do anything but compete amongst each other, they bring their problems here where it echoes out into nothingness and disintegrates. But so long as they feel they were heard or had an online “win”, they get a dopamine hit and sense of progress, entirely ignorant to their apathy.

This can feel, at times, the place that attracts the biggest losers. Like all the troll characters out of South Park’s Skank Hunt saga. But there is also a huge amount of insecurity and desire to be spotlighted. What society thinks of a person is also always a really important thing they’ll post about—just is, they really, really care for some reason.

Moosh that all together and you got a bunch of apathetic, socially anxious, and insecure people that lack social tact and empathy, hidden on keyboards, watching their world fall apart but hoping someone besides them will help it.