People on lemmy are the same fuckwad assholes you meet on reddit. It’s not like being a better person is enforced on the lemmyverse outside of a couple of instances like hexbear and lemmygrad. idk maybe it’s me but it’s like why bother, why not just use reddit if you’re going to be a shitty person or overall debate pervert? Weird shit.
Even beyond the user base reddit has built up a lot of suck over the years. Like they have destroyed all the community made reddit clients and moderation tools for no real reason. And the website keeps getting worse too.
And reactionaries had communities deleted on reddit too. I imagine that’s also part of the .world user base.
People don’t to talk to morally superior people, they want to talk to like minded people. And for assholes, that might just be other assholes.
There have been other attempts before lemmy like voat which I would argue was a lot more toxic than .world. Voat was also very expensive to host once their free azure credits ran out.