When I first joined this community I saw it as a respite from reddit where I was free to chill with people without being constantly expected to debate or defend arguments or anything. Just a forum where people are nice.
Lately though it seems every active comment section is filled to the brim with, to be frank, obnoxious people who want nothing more than to fight with you about everything you say. I think they're known as "debate bros."
I'm not saying debate shouldn't be happening but to be honest it's disappointing seeing it be the only thing occurring. I've tried contributing in other fashions but have been met multiple times with people trying to start arguments with me about things or get me to defend "points" that I didn't make. This in particular has been very annoying. I've reported every instance of this due to it not contributing but I feel as if that's not helping.
I like talking to people I disagree with. I like conversing with differing opinions. But I feel alone in that this isn't the only thing I want to do on a forum.
Again, I'm not trying to definitively say we shouldn't debate at all, but just pointing out how prevalent it seems to be. Id like to just converse with people without being expected to make and defend points. I feel like that's a major thing we should've left on Reddit.
If people want to debate then they can do that. I just dislike that it appears to become the base-level expectation for the instance.
Politics seem more exhausting than on reddit, since there's entire instances that exist soley for the purpose of spreading their beliefs. Which is a pro for them with instances helping to foster a stronger community, but then they seem so much more present every where too. /c/all can be flooded with the topics they want to push if there's a mass submission. And new instances pop up if defederated with the main goal seeming to be not just a community for themselves, but evangelizing. And lemmy isn't at a stage yet where subscribed feeds can provide enough content to avoid /c/all like back on reddit.
Connect for lemmy with keyword filtering and instance blocking has really helped though to reduce the frequency of manual community blocking. Didn't block during the first few weeks though, which was a nice period before it became necessary to curate personal feeds.