I miss being able to make sarcastic comments without someone telling me I'm the sole reason the world went to shit.

That's interesting. I feel like my experience has been the opposite. I'll occasionally post things here, completely expecting some negative response (not looking for it, but I know how people are). For example, I posted a rant about an issue I was having after switching to Linux. Instead of negativity, I typically get responses more like "that's a valid criticism. Have you considered $x, though?", and the conversation continues quite pleasantly.

I feel like reddit was far quicker to jump to "no. You're wrong, and here's why...".

Edit: correcting hypothetical redditor's spelling.

Honestly yeah. I stuck with Lemmy for 3 years before caving and going back to Reddit because I was sick and tired of every single conversation no matter how unrelated circling back to Trumpa-lumpa.

Not to say Reddit isn't its own flavor of horrible. It's banking hard on social media addiction with all those post analytics and reminders to repost and boost engagement. Not to mention the fake AI users. Yuck.

I still sometimes steer people here because I still believe in a decentralized non corporate online space, it just needs to get past the self-selecting echo chamber phase. Once /c/mildlyinteresting isn't 90% doomer news articles I'll consider things a success.

What Reddit does have is niches. There's a sub for dogs, then there's a sub for labradors, and then there's a sub each for yellow, black, and chocolate labs. All of them are lively and active and most importantly on-topic.

could be worse, you could live in a place where people are like that in person.