Hi. So when I'm watching a tv show or movie, and it hits me in the feels, I will think something like "Oh, this movie is wholesome, or this tv show is wholesome" Even if it has swearing in it, as long as the message is a good one. I've been on Lemmy now a couple days, and I rate lemmy super-duper wholesome. Maybe it was the question/thread I asked, but the responses I got were very nice. Lots of people love to cuddle dogs as self-care and by golly, that's just as wholesome as it gets.
Same. To the point where I can barely stand Reddit right now. There's a couple good subs, but the front page, or every really big sub, is so charged and toxic nowadays. I can barely make it through the comments anymore.
My guess is that Lemmy trends towards an older audience (average age is probably 30s), and also a lot of Lemmy come from similar walks of life (many are very technical or work in IT and similar).
You don't find many people arguing over political differences, either. Generally people agree rather than having divisive opinions.
Also definitely playing into it is that many social media platforms are deliberately divisive as it drives usage higher.
I would say that the decentralized nature of the platform means that the demographics that don't get along don't have to share the same space. Reddit is full of communities that fucking hate each other and the centralized nature of the site means that those userbases have to occupy a lot of the same subreddits; those users have a low barrier to entry to go troll each other and pick fights. In the Fediverse, these communities are separate instances and will just defederate from each other, putting an end to it. Instead, like-minded communities and instances can congregate together. The federation model also provides incentive for users to behave, since instances can be cut off from everyone else if they're deemed too toxic/annoying.