TL:DR; I agree and I love it here!
Yeah it certainly feels that way to me too. I can't speak for the rest of the Fediverse platforms (Friendica, Misskey, Mastodon, etc.) but Lemmy is certainly a tight-knit, active and generally friendly group...
You should have seen how it was like here before May this year, when there were only a few dozen users that posted or commented anything at all across all servers, call that tight knit.
Still, I'm so proud of everyone for help in keeping a friendly vibe for the most part, and for user reporting and mod actions keeping trolls at bay. There was quite a bit of concern that when people migrated from Reddit en masse that it Lemmy would be taken over by the same uninspired drivel or become a Reddit repost site. What we got are very healthy meme and shitpost communities with shitposters who engage with commentors, tech news, politics, environment news with active discussions where people have disagreed with each other without getting in a complete rage about it, and cute animal pics like !aww@lemmy.world and !superbowl@lemmy.world.
There's still progress to be made on parts of the technical, moderation and community sides. For my part, I'm trying to post more and my goal this year is to share a lot pictures of the cityscape to Lemmy.