Your perception of lemmy has been tainted by the kind of communities you interact with. You and I have wildly different experiences on this app.

Part of the reason you feel this way may be caused by you being subscribed to unpopularopinion, an inherently contrarian community. If you'd like to be happy, stop following that community.

I also encourage you to avoid engaging in political conversations with non-rational people: It is extremely unlikely that they will change their minds, and even if you do reach an understanding, that conversation is really likely to leave you with a sour feeling.

In comparison, the communities I'm in are mostly about memes, IT, privacy and LGBT stuff. No news about the war, and no political arguments with random, possibly deranged, users.

The instance I'm in doesn't even have downvotes! Depending on how you use lemmy, you can have either really good or really bad experiences. I recommend u to try to avoid conflict, and maybe even switch to a downvote-less instance.

I see it too

I've noticed some instances being very nice overall (hence I'm here) and some being nothing but negative (feddit stood out to me). And occasionally I see a post copy-pasted across a whole bunch of instances with different newly-made accounts sharing misleading news articles.

fortunately, a well oiled block button, and a regex instance filter makes short work of that. I really like lemmy, but just like reddit it's messy

I think it just correlates with leftism in the US and Lemmy was leftist before the Reddit exodus increased the population. I say this as a US center-left liberal (and I get annoyed with it myself).

The leftist movement is very anti-establishment, very pessimistic about their future under capitalism, very pessimistic about the US political establishment, very pessimistic about climate change, very pessimistic about the Israel-Hamas situation, very pessimistic about police, very pessimistic about health care, very pessimistic about both Biden and Temp, very pessimistic about ... pretty much every major issue (except maybe weed).

Edit: I don't mean to "rage against the leftist" either, I think y'all have some good points from time to time and there are definitely things I agree with you on (e.g. the health care system needs major changes). Some of y'all give a real "you must be fun at parties" kind of vibe though and some are about as bad as the Trump supporters in terms of using personal attacks.

I would say that lemmy is just more realist then naive optimist, since more intellectual people probably use lemmy or even try to fund Reddit alternatives.