There are definitely some absolutely wild political takes on Lemmy, even outside of .ml, which leave me feeling some people are completely off their rockers.

Not just political in my experience.

It’s just tiring…part of the reason I think comment sections are usually a ghost town aside from lack of used base.

In active threads there are always a handful of (upvoted) irrational takes seemingly formulated with pure emotion and mostly rage. Any counterpoint is descended upon by equally irrational and hostile responses.

You start to realize that you’re likely arguing with teenagers or people otherwise lacking life experiences…

but if the point of Lemmy is to build a web of community-driven sites which will pull people away from the corporatocratic current iteration, we can't do that if we're making people feel unwelcome if they don't conform to our own little narrow wedge of view

It does sound counter intuitive. I think people on lemmy want those websites to die, but without the traffic coming here.

I don’t have much to add, but I just want to say I appreciate that you used ‘corporatocratic’ instead of ‘corporatist’. Mixing those up is a pet peeve of mine.