Of course it looks that way to you, since your instance already defederated from lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net and other toxic cesspits - see recent example (Lemmy.World's statement and reasoning for defederation from Lemmy.org). The LW admin team does a lot of work to keep things this chill.:-)

There always seems to be drama between instances.

There absolutely is a darker side to Lemmy, but for the most part, many of those "legacy" instances have already been pruned from the federation that we are in now. (I suspect there are smaller, highly niche, "Lemmy" bubbles that even I wouldn't want to go looking for that have never federated with the larger group. There are also various branches you can explore via instances that keep their doors mostly open.)

On the surface, and depending on what you consider toxic, the misinformation campaigns that are run on Lemmy seem fairly normal, but can get fairly dark if you understand the sources and start to do broader geolocation estimation of some of the participants.

There are still the occasional DDoS's and the occasional CSAM posters, both of those are only a degree or two away from the really nasty shit.

The biggest issue now, and probably will always be, is how easy it is to avoid bans. Some seriously troubled users have generated hundreds of accounts across multiple instances just to troll and appear to generate traffic to specific communities. ("you_emm" being one of the worst, but its posts are fairly easy to sniff out still. It will actively search for untagged mentions as well, hence, my obfuscation.)

But for the most part, the bullshit is easy to filter out. When you stumble across a specific niche, they tend to niche themselves super hard, so beware. All-in-all, Lemmy is chill and fairly quiet which is why I still use it.

It is way more chill. Feels like 2014 Reddit.