For me it's been like a splash of cold water to the face, remembering just how fucked up 
tier liberal takes were, are, and will likely continue to be.
I'm sure there's downsides to complacency, but it was nice having some ground assumptions when going into a thread, like "society can and should be improved somewhat" or "the ruling class acts in its own immediate self interests and any other claims regarding their motivations are propagandized lies" or "climate change is real, it's bad, and it's getting worse," or more trivial stuff like "Tesla cars aren't good."
I'm sure potential comrades are out there and while it really is necessary to reach out to more people at some point (offline too, orgs especially, but while we're here, you know?), it's been sobering to realize just how far rightward mainstream "progressive" liberal thought really is on average. 
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The cozy pre-federation vibe is overrated. Pre-federation, we constantly had pointless struggle sessions like whether bidets are for middle class losers (they aren't) or whether stacking rocks destroys the local stream ecosystem (they do). The infamous struggle sessions that were before my time like the outside cat struggle session had people issuing death threats lol.
There was a weird pent-up level of resentment people had with each other. Since federation, we mostly went from internal struggle sessions to external lib dunking. The pent-up resentment was released on some shitty lib, but they 100% deserved it, so who cares.
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I can't speak for everyone and I'm not on board with the "some people need to be bullied more" takes I sometimes see (bullying is contagious and makes more bullies than it prevents; I see this all the time at work), but I did see some of that and because we're not actually the unified hivemind that liberals make us out to be, there's nothing I can do about it.