Perhaps for lemmy, the Orca Toasts at Noon.

But yeah, lemmy actually feels like a community. I haven't seen too much of a "thread consensus" effect, where any differing views get buried with downvotes for not agreeing. The only mass downvoted comments I've seen so far were blatant racism/sexism/homophobia/other noncivil comments, and LITERAL shitposts.

TLDR: Lemmy circlejerks way less, but allows uncensored gifs of people pooping in comments

So what I'm hearing is that we need some kind of "code phrase" to identify ourselves as fediverse users in the real word.

How about "The (noun)_ beans at (time)_" as a starting point?

I would not overly praise old reddit like this. I agree that people were more open minded and willing to engage in substantive discussions, but old reddit was also hosting the likes of /r/jailbait, /r/coontown, /r/n*ggers. There's good and bad aspects.