I had a burner account back years ago before it was federated with the rest of Lemmy.

I'd already well-passed the stage where I was spending more time online than doing actual movement building on the ground so the low-content and causal comms are too chatty for me to even bother. There's also some underlying abusive moderation (at least there was a couple of years ago), but that's something I've seen on everywhere from .world to .ml, this is volunteer work and beggars usually can't be choosers, there's nearly always someone on a staff team who just deletes things they don't like. Purging that behavior is tough without a healthy mod culture and mods who care enough to start a fight.

On the other hand, there's some good comms among the slop and they keep liberals from coming in every minute with dumb questions they could have checked with a single web search or just reading an FAQ, so that's a huge plus (tourists can go to lemmy.ml or lemmygrad.ml with any good-faith questions). Their dev work is commendable. For the place that it is, it's done alright for itself, there's a decent foundation from what I can tell, which is especially hard for a big-tent socialist site to build given the conflicting worldviews and values that arise.

If so, what are some misconceptions or seldom known facts?

It's pretty hilarious how many of them seem repulsed by /leftypol/. They're remarkably similar cultures, just less PDFs and "read a fucking book" culture, less catgirls and no ironic slurs.