Got what I needed, thanks to those who responded in good faith!
This isn’t my main account but after poking around Lemmy for about half a year, this seems to be what people are saying (and my general impression)
- Lemmygard, Hexbear - Ultra Tankies
- Lemmy.ml - Commies and Tankies, the gateway to the above. Users can and will use every opportunity to drown others in Marxist rhetoric
- Beehaw - Highly sensitive lefties who are blocking both lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works on Instance level because of open registration policy (as if registering to any instance takes effort).
- slrpnk.net - Hippies who like cyberpunk
- lemmy.dbzer0.com - Anarchists who hate tankies and any rules except their own, which are different and therefore better
- lemmy.blahaj.zone - LGBTQ+ folk who hate tankies
and lefties(i meant to write rightoids) - various regional instances - left leaning but according to above, not enough and therefor fascists and nazis
- lemmy.world - open instance, therefor if you ask anyone above regional instances, basically fascists and nazis
- sh.itjust.works - anything goes, therefor if you ask anyone above lemmy.world, basically fascists and nazis
- programming.dev - nerds and therefor suspicious to everyone
- piefed - no idea but judging by how people talk about it, Lemmy is clearly becoming too mainstream so some people feel they need to move into further obscurity.
anything else: either nazis or tankies depending on who you ask.
I really like Lemmy on paper but good god this instance drama is off-putting. Also it’s hard to find out which instances are blocking which instances - which I find silly altogether because people are specifically hyping fediverse because “iTs AlL coNnEcTeD” and “you are in charge of your feed”. I’m contemplating running one or two communities (and I’m totally fine with them being small and slow) but I don’t know where I dare to make them because apparently I’d have to be paying far closer attention to the nitty gritty of every bit of instance drama to make sure I’m not on “the wrong side”. Or if I make the communities on some instance with banhappy admins who decide that I’m a tankie/nazi because I allowed someone to post content from someone who said something vaguely wrong on Twitter 10 years ago.
Is there like a guide document somewhere that lists the features, vibes and general content policy, and banned instances and all that of at least the major instances? Because this is like walking on eggshells.
The only drama I’m aware of (beyond the small spat with hexbear I mentioned) is how feddit.org’s admins were extra cautious regarding discourse on Israel/Palestine in the wake of October 7th. Given the the servers are physically located in Germany (and as such apparently the admins can go to jail over their content) it was disappointing but understandable to me, and pissed off a lot of the more audibly anti-genocide and anti-imperialism users.
I think, sadly, this kind of tribalism is part of the growing pains for federated online communities, especially the more “Western” ones. Instances behave like villages or city-states towards each other, while in physical space we’ve all grown up and been socialized inside (comparatively) huge nation-states.
The irony.