Welcome! In my biais view we're less toxic but still far from perfect.
Don't hesitate to post on smaller communities. People will be so happy to see a post they will forgot to be negative.
I look forward to read from you again (^_^)

Are we growing though?

https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats shows MAU (monthly active users) decreasing - we are now at 43k, last month was 45k, the month before 47k, etc. Total servers also decreasing - now 540, was 552, 579, etc. Overall posts and comments are slightly up though - so we're seeing increased activity from fewer users, rather than an increase in actual users. One could argue whether we're truly "decreasing" vs. merely flat, but either way I don't see us increasing.

And 3 of those users are myself, all active and only 2 of which I had a week ago, speaking to how alts are most definitely a thing. Also, federation issues especially staying in sync with Lemmy.World may be causing people to shift instances (or to leave entirely?). If so that would be a good thing bc 0.19.6 promises to help address that. (Although in my case, I wanted an instance that allows custom blocks of any instance I choose without needing to rely on an admin team, and that isn't dependent upon the Lemmy codebase.)

For one thing, people might be turning away due to the upcoming USA election, in which case depending on who survives that, they could return? But every person I've ever recommended to check out Lemmy has looked at me in disgust and actively chided me for having recommended it when they see some of the political extremism here. e.g.:

Whenever I go looking for examples of such I usually find it in 0-60 seconds, by going to Lemmy.ml and browsing by Local.

Your instance is doing wonderful work keeping such out - I wonder if that image will even render for you:-). But overall, across the wide Fediverse, people are not willing to put up with such, and seem to be leaving us overall rather than find some other way to deal with whatever it is that was bugging them.

And with such trends, and the way we treat normies, I don't see us ever going mainstream. Maybe PieFed and Sublinks, along with Mbin and ofc Tesseract on e.g. dubvee.org will help turn that around? That would be so nice?:-)

Btw what will we call ourselves then, if it does - will we still be "Lemmy"/Lemmings, or just general Fedizens? Either way there's great hope for the future, but also a lot of work to do to reach that point.

Uh yeah welcome, could you leave that baggage outside tho? kthx

I have no problem with people sharing their opinions on Lemmy.

just as long as they aren't wrong.

There are too many negative posts on lemmy. I don't know why that is so but it do.

Yeah, it takes a while to deprogram :(