I installed the official Reddit app and went on it to see what the old place was looking like now. My inbox was filled with spam. The "home feed" shows subs I never subscribed to. There are so many ads. Between the ads and the the extra subs in the feed, it's hard to just scroll. I also noted a lot of spam in some of the subs. Maybe they are subs with no mods? I'm not sure what's up with that.
Lemmy.ml is my home instance too, so that could explain my overall experience. I started out on lemmy.world and it seemed pretty friendly. Then I switched to ML when Threads was federated because I didn't want to see Threads content. It never occurred to me that the change of tone might be from switching instances rather than Lemmy itself just growing. I guess it could be both, since I frequently browse the everything feed which has content from everywhere.