Here's a ~~hard~~ (edit: damnit! "hint"!) that when I noticed it, improved my experience on the Fediverse enormously. Enough to convince me not to leave it outright as I nearly did. Pay attention to what instance someone is from. It's no 100% guarantee... but it's not useless either. This is like 1000% more relevant for someone on an instance other than Lemmy.world, but it still helps for you too.

The aggressiveness also varies by community, so likewise, some of those are just straight up worth blocking (so that you don't keep forgetting and end up replying in it yet again and again) and finding alternatives for.

"I like the way Lemmy functions, with things like an open moderator log and the way that instances can be created to prevent too much control from one singular instance from pushing people completely off the platform if they have bad moderation, for example."

Oh yeah that seems an excellent way to keep a power balance between users and moderation. Hadn't used reddit all that much, but heard of the nightmarish moderation abuse.

"I don’t like the users. For every one user that is nice and wants to have a legitimate conversation, there are like 300 that just want to fight/argue or spew politics into a non-political conversation."

Sadly is a big issue with many platforms where politics is used for excuse to mental flex, invalidate, clout motives, and flat out bully. So i try to avoid politics or deflect and avoid people who just looking to argue for the sake of argueing to assert dominance. Too many headaches online deal with.

"The number of users I have blocked on Lemmy is far longer than the amount of users I ever blocked on Reddit, and my Reddit account existed for about 10 years."

I might do the same tbh, i can see there are quite a bit of users needing filtered out on lemmy. Can also see some get angry knowing that people would rather just block em' and not engage with them because then they can't fuel their clout driven ego 🙂

"The problem with this is that particularly nasty users can keep creating accounts on instances they keep creating in order to harass people they don’t like. So even if you block them, they just switch to a new account, etc."

Perhaps this could be resolved by implementing a user follow list and making it so users can only be interacted with if the user approves the follower who is trying to follow em'

"They can also do this for vote manipulation, not like that really matters on Lemmy but Lemmy users seem to have fallen victim to the same problem Redditors had: seeing a comment with 0 or -1 score and then completely disregarding whatever it said, not reading it and downvoting it automatically."

Imo i think lemmy could just do away with a voting system, it would reduce cognitive bias by not giving them a sense of popularity contest to determine if it's worth reading a user's post or comment. People should judge for themselves rather than having others do it for them.

You seem a a reasonably decent person btw.