I feel like things on Lemmy were pretty chill several months ago, and that’s started to change.
People used to talk each other like they would talk to a neighbor. Now I get the sense that people have become quick to be negative, attack, and not be constructive.
Am I crazy in feeling like the vibe has changed?
I think it’s just a growing pain of the contradictions of Federation resolving themselves, mostly in the political sphere.
You have left-wing instances (lemmygrad.ml), center-right instances (lemmy.world), and right-wing instances (sh.itjust.works). Even if different instances defederate with each other, there will always be overlap instances (lemmy.ml being the biggest, but also lemm.ee, startrek.website, mander.xyz, programming.dev, etc.). And while individual users can block specific instances, this doesn’t prevent them from seeing and responding to their posts. Communists and Liberals and Libertarians, who each believe the others are literally as bad as the Nazis (and I’m not making a value judgement here - maybe some of them are right), are forced to interact with each other on occasionally political topics.
The hard right, unlike in Reddit, isn’t really a figure here - and moderators on Lemmy don’t know how to handle political disagreements where both sides are within the sphere of acceptable discourse.
That and an election year plus huge, ongoing international events recently means people are all heightened and on edge.