I am myself a newcomer, did a full switch straight from reddit.
However, I did it just a few weeks before mods and admins started to crack down hard on certain opinions. Guess I had seen the sign on the wall.
I believe reddit’s clear change of direction has pushed many more people into the lemmyverse, many of them just like me, straight from reddit.
I sense that recently the tone around many subs has shifted towards more agressive and more divisive, and other patterns I recognize all too well from my years on reddit.
Do other people sense this too? Am I on the right track or completely off?
I’d be willing to bet that there’s a direct relationship between not just the size of an online community and its overall “civility” level, but also its age. I’ve seen threads in chat rooms of 8 normally good-natured folks get Godwin’d just because they continued on for long enough that one topic turned heated. With Lemmy we’re seeing a natural increase in both.
I joined about 3 years ago and there was much, much less content and conversation, which definitely made me try to be more polite as possible to the few who posted (if only because it’d be the same folks over and over again and I didn’t want to discourage them from participating). Now that’s less of a concern, so while I still try to be mindful of my posts and comments, it’s to much less of a degree than before.