Most of the negative comments are from Lemmy.world users, which is the instance that recieves the bulk of the Reddit crowd before the users find a more fitting instance.
Lemmy.world tends to attract people from Reddit that are too ideological to stay, but want the same thing as Reddit without the enshittification, so they go to the largest generalist instance first. Over time, some leave for more specialized instances, like Beehaw, Lemmy.ml, programming.dev, or blahaj.zone, so that leaves .world usually with newer accounts, or people who just want Reddit 2 before it went to shit.
Not saying everyone from .world is bad, of course not, but what drives users to .world over more niche instances is usually coming straight from Reddit.
I joined Lemmy.ml because it looked like the largest generalist instance plus apparently ran by Lemmy developers. Here you list it as a specialist one. Well, I couldn’t have known at the time. :D
Wait I am in this comment I left reddit and joined world then wanted to switch to a different one so just joined .ee arbitrarily. Is there a short reference somewhere of how these are all different from each other?
Unfortunately you only get a good overview by being here a long time and paying a bit of attention to the seasonal drama. The biggest pointers, to my knowledge, would be that a lot of instances are defederated with lemmygrad and hexbear (but not all), because otherwise the bad faith campism and trolling gets unbearable, world is defederated with the piracy instance, and virtually every large server is defederated with “free speech absolutists” who let their instances fester with far right types.
Someone once posted a graphic showing how each instance leaned politically and I thought it was pretty useful. Some more important distinctions between them are censorship, many will censor bad words or content they find objectionable and I just couldn’t tolerate how dumb that was so I picked a fairly anarchist anything goes instance.
Here is a good spot to pick an Instance. You can stay with .ee if you want, but I recommend picking a new instance that fits what you personally prefer! You can also check what instances are federated with which other instances. For example, .world isn’t federated with Lemmygrad or Hexbear, but .ml is federated with all 3, so you may wish to change your instance accordingly.
Where do I see who is federated with who? Couldn’t find it from that link. Would def prefer one that is federated with a broad scope of others