Yeah I've been the same, and when I've browsed the comments there is so much aggro. Makes me wonder if it's always been like that and I was just blind to it.
Overall, the experience here is 1000 times better than Reddit
Yeah you definitely can, I have a few other instances 'Community' pages bookmarked so I can go and check them out if my main instance is down. Is read-only and you can't vote but that's not really a big issue.