Lemmy is so good right now for no particular reason
It's not the kids, not the lurkers, not the mods... y'all just nice people. Lemmy's got a good vibe going... or at least enough windows that we can close if the vibe gets shit.
I can't speak for everyone. I've been lurking for the past couple weeks and just signed up yesterday. The prevailing attitude I've noticed is that people realize just how much of a toxic hog lagoon reddit has become, and are glad to participate in a community that isn't. It's nice to be somewhere that isn't full of bots and doesn't coddle nazis.
I also think it helps that most of the onboarding literature is frontloaded with "this is how federation works" instead of jumping right in to "here's how you sign up and use lemmy." Effectively scares off the reading-averse.
If considering that to be a plus makes me an elitist, I'm ok with that.
This is really such a great example for why Fediverse and FOSS in general are the superior and much healthier way for society's social media interactions to go. Hopefully, some day in the near future, unprofitable social media monoliths like Meta, Twitter and Reddit will be so blatantly exploiting of their user base that even normies migrate to free software alternatives and the era of ultra-capitalist mega-corporations in social media encouraging hate and toxicity will finally be over.
Fair enough. And like you said, if an instance becomes toxic enough, no one will want to federate with them, and users will switch from instances that do to instances that don't.