The times these users seem to operate in is suspicious

I'm with you. I had reddit tuned to make me feel better. I saw cute animals and silly memes, cool niche hobbies, active small communities. Here it's almost entirely doom and gloom. Fighting and arguing. Unfunny, serious memes.

Makes me very glad I found a friendly discord community to be in.

I don't think so. The amount of doom on lemmy is insane, this isn't a very fun place. Comments using ableist slurs are upvoted. The meme communities are just a facade for more dooming. I swear this site is full of people that get off knowing they're making someone else feel bad.

I'm so sorry to hear that happened to you. I reported a racist game I saw on Steam and I don't think anything ever came of it. You can turn off non-friends leaving comments on your profile, it's not a great solution but at least it'll prevent shitty comments on your profile in the future.

I went to odysee once and saw the Babylon Bee advertised front page. Told me all I needed to know about the platform.