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honestly I found this was dependant on the instance you are on. I switched instances off my previous one (well technically I bounce back and forth) and I find it super dependant on the instance I'm on with what the toxicity levels are.
I see this a lot and I really don't understand it. Here I am on lemmy.world, replying to you on sh.itjust.works, on a post from lemmy.ml. Clearly neither of us are browsing just our local instance, and indeed I imagine most people are not. So what does it matter what instance anyone is on, beyond instance-specific defederations?
There is a sense of comraderie on most instances. Not sure if that's the case on .world since y'all are so large and general purpose.
And also the level of moderation sometimes differs greatly based on where communities are hosted.
Also, defederations matter a lot, considering beehaw and hexbear, two of the 10 largest servers, are defederated with a large number of other servers. A new user on sh.itjust.works or lemmy.world is going to have a very different experience than one on lemmy.ml, because they won't have any interaction with hexbears or beehawers.
The instance matters less once you've been here a while and figured out how to find everything, but for new users it can often be a significant barrier to entry if they join the wrong instance and have a bad experience.
I think it depends a lot on what the instance you're on considers is I see vastly different topics of posts between the two instances that I'm on