My theory is Lemmy is heavily populated by neurodivergent folks, who may have varying expressions of humor, and also may not pick up on certain expressions of humor as easily. This lends to a feeling of "super-seriousness" or aloofness at times.
It's been better, but for about a year now it looks like a number of lost people have been roaming lemmy sowing confusion...plenty of users used to say this was a really welcoming environment, particularly before the reddit IPO/LLMs...
It's not that difficult. Plenty of sites manage to do just fine with text comments and still be light hearted. A big problem is lemmy seems to willfully misinterpret comments to the worse possible meaning.