Things were great when I first joined Lemmy a year ago -- it truly felt like a community -- but then unfortunately some of the same toxic Reddit-like behavior started to creep in.
I've since learned that if I avoid the two largest Lemmy instances, plus some of the more sketchy ones like Beehaw and Hexbear, for the most part it's good.
In the U.S., this kind of hypocrisy is so common that people apparently no longer notice it -- if they even did in the first place.