Just an extension to this, when I used Reddit, /r/all was too big and had a bunch of crap I didn’t care about, and I browsed my home page of subscribed communities.

On here I only ever browse All, despite the drawbacks. I think it’s practically the only way to use Lemmy. OP might have subscribed to a dozen communities and felt claustrophobic especially if they’re coming from Reddit.

Different instances are more or less insular though. Hexbear can be good fun but once you realize 95% of the posts and comments are from like 200 people it feels more like a discord server than a federated link aggregator. db0 federates with most big instances so even our local communities don’t feel as insular. .world is .world, for better and for worse.

Sorry about that, I'll try to get my friend on here who's nicer than me.

Sounds about right. Outside of political threads, I've only noticed and tagged maybe three users that are truly toxic (as in they enter every conversation with an insult and devolve from there). The problem is that those users are active everywhere and make the Lemmyverse feel much less welcoming than it actually is.