Gonna just say it. As a longtime Lemmy user I’m really not a fan of a lot of the people coming over from Reddit. It’s probably just a small but vocal minority and confirmation bias on my part, but I get the impression that they are trying to turn Lemmy into Reddit, toxicity, entitlement, stupid challenges and all.
When we’ve had two major debacles before Reddit even opened back up, one about “how dare these unpaid admins try to lessen their workload with sign up questions”, and the other about “how dare instances block other instances that are being used as proxies for forwarding spam and bot content into their own instances.” The people from reddit seem to still think they’re on Reddit and any perceived inferiority that Lemmy has compared to Reddit is seen as just as bad as Reddit’s corporate decisions. A few people even trying to go to an instance with the intent of “converting” the existing users who may be socialist or communist, by commenting abuse on their posts of course, just like how they presumably do it on Reddit.
People also seem to be refusing to learn what federation is and how that works, despite it being literally the most important aspects of Lemmy. This is evident in people telling instances who block spam or troll ridden instances to “mind their own business” as if that content doesn’t get forwarded over to and show up on the main pages of other instances, you know, what the fediverse was designed to do.
FYI, Reddit has opened back up. Spez has made it clear that he will never tolerate subreddits shutting down and inconveniencing you again. If you’re so unwilling to even adopt a different mindset and perspective when coming to Lemmy, I think it’s best if you went back. Plenty of us came here because we didn’t want to be on Reddit.
Last thing and a pet peeve of mine: stop calling yourself a refugee. You left a meme website for another meme website because you didn’t like one aspect of the management, the entire decision and migration probably took less than an hour of you sitting in your comfortable house in front of a computer. To compare that to being a refugee speaks volumes about your entitlement and privilege. And it’s especially ironic considering what real refugees go through to save themselves and their families, that you won’t even answer a few registration questions.
It’s cool that you want to be open minded and respectful but you really don’t need to lick this guy’s boots or anyone else proclaiming some kind of exceptionalism for participating on some web forums before you or I did. I can appreciate it probably feels unwelcome seeing a community you were comfortable in change with an influx of new people but there’s some glaring ironies to what this guy is saying and it pretty much just boils down to gatekeeping.
It’s particularly amusing how he has managed to engineer vicarious offence at people calling themselves refugees because of the lack of real hardship compared to real refugees yet cannot see the “go back to where you came from” written between and sometimes even on the lines of every sneering paragraph. There’s an overall lack of awareness that’s sadly ironic for the author of this polemic against newcomers and their supposed lack of awareness.
No, I think you’ll be just fine being yourself and not walking on eggshells for people like this, frankly they needs a cold shower and a dose of reality.