The Fediverse can be as toxic as traditional centralized social networks.

Well people are toxic. The fediverse itself cant be toxic. Why would people stop being assholes just because they went to a different platform?

Take a look over one of those huge toxic threads, and count up how many people are being assholes, and how many people are just there to type their happy little comments.

In my experience, the number of assholes is in the low single digits. It's actually not that bad. It's just that anyone who's an asshole tends to amp up other people into a big spat, and also that they stick out (and attract more attention and replies) than the normal people. But there really aren't that many of them. They're just noisy.

Also, it helps to stay away from lemmy.world. For whatever reason, the shouty bad-opinion people tend to congregate there. I recommend Beehaw.

Absolutely agree

I mean, all this says is people are going to be people and unfortunately the vast number of people are terrible.

Obviously. It's still just people hiding behind anonymized usernames and interacting with posts that are largely singular ideas.

The risks associated with being an asshole are largely removed and the ability to empathize is limited by lack of access to things like body language, facial expression, tone of voice, and real time communication. Of course people will be emboldened to be their most brazen selves in an environment like that.

I mean, the hype I saw was about it not being corporate controlled. When I'd see someone saying something about it being a nicer place, it was more in the "and because it's so small..." line of thinking, way down the list.

Has the hype team changed their focus at this point? It's pretty rare for me to leave the fediverse for online boils human interaction at this point, so it may be what people are saying and I'm just not aware of it

But, even back before the reddit api wave, it had its own toxicity. After that, there was a surge where it increased, then it went back to its usual. This wave seems to be following the pattern.

Mind you, I still find it to be less toxic than reddit, here on lemmy and the threadiverse. If a day went by and someone wasn't being a douche, an asshole, or a fuckwit on reddit, it was a great day. I can sometimes go a week without encountering such behavior coming my way, and I'm a bit of an asshole. When it's directed at other people, it gets reported and eventually handled, so it seems fairly low toxicity compared to reddit.

I'd say the same about Mastodon and the microblogging side of the fediverse too. Lower than twitter was, and waaaaay lower than twitter now.

But definitely not so low it's some kind of oddity. It matches more of the levels of the old web, where forums were more distributed. Still lower than some of the old web chat groups, those could make 4chan look healthy. A bit higher than ICQ was.

and yet there are meaningful differences despite that.

Well they sure are trying. It's quite the effort to try keep up with the content filters to keep this place even half-tolerable

Sure, it's still the Internet!