You are a treasure... - and places such as the newtolemmy@lemmy.ca community are helpful as well - but a post or community that you need to find somewhere first is not the same as an official explanation offered to everyone (to clarify my earlier statement, I meant that nobody "officially" explains this to all newcomers).

Here for instance is the entirety of the sidebar text of OP's instance, which again has a full-page advertisement to donate to the further developement of the Lemmy sourcecode (+ the hidden activity of time spent administering that heavily political instance), plus multiple additional links to donate, yet seems to me to lack an explanation of e.g. "hexbear".

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Nor did I see it mentioned anywhere on https://wiki.startrek.website/books/startrekwebsite/page/what-to-expect-with-an-account-on-startrekwebsite. To be fair, hexbear.net is now defederated from it, as too is lemmygrad.ml, but this was not always so in the past, and this was one of the reasons I left that instance long ago. Though conversely, instances that still federate with hexbear.net, such as lemmy.zip, do not seem to offer any warnings either?

Lemmy can be a highly toxic place. The maximum here seems much worse than Reddit, even though the average (discounting certain instances) is much much lower. Lemmy can be cleaned up by blocking toxic people, whereas on Reddit that endeavor is just a lost cause.

Which is why I am placing my hopes for the Threadiverse not in Lemmy but in PieFed, one of its many features that Lemmy lacks being the automatic labeling of toxic users - they can still say whatever they want, but their reputation now precedes them.