Same. I noticed that I had become argumentative, even combative, and I got to where I would write out whole responses and then just delete them rather than send, knowing what replies I was almost certain to receive. It's not a place for good faith discussions... at least, not anymore, and that was true even by the time of the Rexodus/APIcalypse.

Any social media - including the Threadiverse - can be addictive. Fortunately there is no real incentive here to do so, and many blocks in place to prevent it actually - like as you noted, limiting scrolling to pages rather than allow infinite.

Extremely unfortunately, niche communities don't exist here and so you have to go to wherever those are. But I find myself lurking with no desire to engage, most of the time even in the form of voting. I like the OC but the system that presents it is distasteful to me, to put it mildly, and I find that extremely off-putting.

On the internet we seem to have forgotten: good fences make good neighbors.

When we feel like we are forced into platforming every single batshit insane ideology - like hexbears to name one, though your instance at least had the foresight to defederate from it early on - then we expose people to all the dregs that social media can offer to people.

Like, how can two adults converse with one another, when surrounded by children screaming their heads off - which is not "wrong", but like... can't there even be so much as one room where that level of noise is prevented?

Anyway, I agree that Lemmy's blocking tools are vastly inferior to the task of trying to deal with the situation that you mentioned. The upcoming release of Lemmy 1.0 will help somewhat, by allowing mods to receive remote reports from other instances, but it still would need a LONG way to go - like e.g. implement a true instance blocking capability.