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 removed, 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.
I see your instance is federated with both Hexbear and Lemmygrad. Going to gesture vaguely at that being the root of your problem (or at least > 90% of it).
Blocking instances helps, but you’ll still see users from there in the comments and in other communities (not on the blocked instance). Some UIs will hide users from blocked instances. I know Tesseract does (I wrote it to do that), but others might as well.
My experience here has been pretty great after getting my blocklist and feed curated.
Twitter made me hate people. FB made me realize just how dumb people are. Reddit made me realize that there are no good guys in positions of power. Bluesky is actually pretty chill. But I prefer this format. A forum style.