it's not just the Grad unfortunately. lemmy will never be a legitimate thing when in general such extremist fascism is not only tolerated, but encouraged (and even questioning or disagreeing politely leads to instance and community bans). I don't even know why I bother coming to check sometimes when all I see is such extreme hate (at least hate larping)
that's exactly why Lemmy is destined to fail. They had so many users when Reddit fell apart, but then the dumbass tankie devs started booting and insulting all of the reddit users
Mention lemmy now outside of Lemmy and it's handwaved 'filled with bigots'
It's the leftist side of what usually happens when a subset of users break or are driven off of a platform and go to find a different one. Usually it's right wingers. As one example, Voat gained a surge of users after /r/thedonald was banned. Didn't take long for it to become a cesspool of racism and hatred, all thanks to the paradox of tolerance. What's happening on Lemmy in places like grad and ml is just the extreme leftist version.
Political ideology is like a horseshoe, and the opposite ends are closer to each other than they realize. Same, same, but different.
I was fairly active in Voat when it was around. I was the only dissenting voice there. It was always shit well before T_D was banned. Voat has always been filled with neo-nazi extremism following the ban of /r/uncensorednews, which is a neo-nazi subreddit. It's actually what got me interested in extremists to begin with.
Anyways
I think horse-shoe theory is a bunch of bullshit, but that's because I think left-right is a bunch of even worse bullshit. From my experiences, extremists all share the common trends of violence, anger and bigotry; the only flavour is hatred. As for the paradox of intolerance, know that it grants exclusive abilities to the tolerated, which becomes intolerable of everything else. It's a part of the paradox that's rarely mentioned. I tend to avoid it, really, just seems like people who use it want to justify censorship.