I am old'ish so this checks out.

Lemmy has its quirks and it has its own distinct cliques, for sure. Posting specific viewpoints on some specific instances can be a bit awkward, especially for new users. Let's just say that if you haven't been called a capitalist pig baby killer at least once on Lemmy, you haven't had the full, well rounded experience.

All in all, Lemmy is fairly nice but people can still play follow the leader with comments. That is a curse with all social media, I'm afraid.

I think that was just a matter of fortunate timing. The other Reddit migrations were due to toxic subs being banned, so the worst parts of Reddit migrated to whatever platforms were being discussed at the time, which happened to be mainly Voat.

The July 1st exodus was due to the Reddit API being paywalled at extortionate rates to crush third-party apps, which affected normal users - particularly long-time contributors and the tech-savvy. Lemmy discussion was picking up steam at the time, so that's where a lot of these users went.

If the timings were reversed and Lemmy got the worst users Reddit had to offer Lemmy probably would have handled it much better than Voat did (especially since the devs would loathe the new users), but I'd imagine a split forming between instances, with right-wing instances being defederated and creating their own bubbles of toxicity.

Yeah the thing I got from here was an understanding that focusing on free speech just means you have the worst users. If you want a free speech instance you’re free to be on one that others are defederated from

Probably because we get excited for new tech my shit and AP/Fediverse/Lemmy is so hot right now.