I mean… if you spend time actually discussing the fediverse, it IS a shitshole. We drove off fucking Alec of Technology Connections for crying out loud.

It is the problem any message board had where the “old guard” get really pissy when they see new people who aren’t making the same in jokes and deferring to them at every step. So you have endless bullying and shitposting and so forth to make sure they understand “the community”.

Mastodon is still awesome if you mostly get ignored by them but it goes to shit REAL fast once they see people are having fun and it doesn’t involve them. Been scaling back over the past few months as a result.

Lemmy is doing a bit better. In large part because most of the horrors are confined to the tankie servers. But you still get the groups of people who make the olde reddit “I am technically correct and you will respect that” crowd seem to be not that bad. It is kind of depressing when the best outcome is often that someone posts a complete non sequitor and then wanders off rather than ACTUALLY have a conversation about the implications of “AI” and astroturfing.