You are right! I read and parsed it backwards and thought the comment was dire 🤣. Thought the OP was asking for plausible sounding falsehoods and the commenter said “you are loved and deserve happiness”. I retract my statement. I think Fediverse will stay nice. People on more main stream anonymous social sites are even mostly nice like this don’t you think?
Ah gotcha! I think the nature of anonymous social media brings out the best and worst in people. Some people will go out of their way to help people for nothing in return, not even clout. Others use the veil to hurt others without accountability. Then again, we see these things on social media where people's names are attached, so idk. I think the slightly convoluted nature of the fediverse will filter out a lot of people for now, but what kinds of people I'm not sure.
I do think positivity and kindness are the majority, and assholes are the very loud minority. I also think that having good mods and modding tools behind the scenes can affect the atmosphere a bunch as well. Lemmy feels great right now because it's small, but how will it scale? That remains to be seen 🤷♀️
The buttheads (or at least, the people I perceive to be buttheads) will come. It's still way too early days to try and predict how things will go.
Will it go like reddit, with 'powermods' modding 100s of subs and exercising control to further whatever narrative they support? Will the community spirit lead to the 'buttheads' fracturing into their own private butthead instance, leaving the non-buttheads to enjoy lemmy together (potentially leading to us echo-chambering)?
Imo it'll be something like the latter. Ruud seems sensible and reasonable, so I hope would find a way to avoid 'super' or 'power' mods. And many antagonistic buttheads will quickly find, it's not as much fun being antagonistic when there's no-one to antagonise, so they'll always be popping back in.