…sometimes it does feel like this.
Have you ever blocked anyone at all? Or a community, or perhaps your feed is always set to Subscribed? Most of us readily forget what Lemmy looks like to a day-1 account. It takes a bit of effort to clean it up, and if they don’t see the value in remaining then they won’t put in that effort to learn, rather than simply leave.
I have 9 users blocked, 10 communities blocked (mostly based on taste, not due to toxicity though), and 0 blocked instances.
Rawdogging Lemmy without blocking hexbear and the .ml instances… good luck!
You know, I’m well aware of their reputations and I’ve had a small number of encounters with users from those instances that I’ll charitably leave at “bad faith,” but by and large I don’t really bump into communities hosted on their instances or see overtly bad behavior from their users often.
I’m not trying to defend them or say it doesn’t happen (largely because frankly, I just don’t care one way or the other), but I can only be honest and speak to my individual experience.
