Title basically. I was here at the very start of it all and really enjoyed it. However I felt it lost its uniqueness within a few months of mass migration and started turning a bit like reddit again so I deleted my old account. However Reddit has only gotten much much worse since, and Lemmy has stayed about the same. So here again.
Its gotten significantly less optimistic and more cynical. Its in my opinion more of a reflection of the state of the world than a Lemmy specific issue but it affects Lemmy users more because this isnt a space that allows people to live in ignorant bliss.
I run on another reddit alternative that was apparently an offshoot refuge after Squabbler shit hit the fan (so extremely niche yet somewhat active community) with a completely different demographic of users to Lemmy (mostly middle-aged centrists/liberals that couldn’t tell apart a Linux distro from a macbook), and I can tell you.
It’s universal.
I posted something the other day about how nice it was to wake up and have your feet hit a warm rug that’s been baked in a sunbeam first thing in the morning, and shityounot the replies I immediately got ranged from “Why even bother getting out of bed” and a list of things that are “far superior” to a warm rug. Just blatant whataboutism all the way down, and almost made me consider that if I had posted the opposite, about how much I dislike that sort of thing, if people would have then flipflopped and disagreed lol
Then I came to Lemmy for a break, and the first post I saw was a photo of someone’s pet bunny next to some food they’d ordered, and every single comment was about how OP was a bad person and should be ashamed of themselves for using a delivery app. It was fucking wild.
I think it’s genuinely just the state of the world right now. Everyone’s enraged as hell and seemingly have zero real world outlets for it. So it all just gets funneled into stranger interactions online.
I just try not to read replies and generally move on with my day rather than absorb all that insanity. If people really need an outlet or whatever that badly they can go scream at ChatGPT for an hour lmao