I deleted Reddit from my home screen when the mods did the fake strike and I've mostly kept off of it since then, but in the past few weeks I've opened it out of boredom and holy God is it just a truly awful place. My only explanation is that it's a window into the psyche of the American middle class email job worker and they're so fucking brain rotten that it hurts to even look at.
I thought I was misremembering or that 
was just a good meme, but that site really does represent the absolute worst of American liberalism. I don't even have anything specific to say, I just need to scrape out the festering mass that a 15 minute scroll session there created in my brain.
I've always preferred smaller online communities. I think you're right though, there's a sweet spot.
Even a month ago it was kinda a ghost town. Enough people have finally moved over to make it more interesting. Having just experienced yet another unexpected but adverse interaction with a toxic reddit mod I think I’m pretty much done there.
Yeah I've on Hexbear since the start which has been a bit more active. I jumped on Lemmy around the same time and there wasn't much.