Correct me if I'm wrong, but I rarely see any mass comments from people in ml. In political topics, it's mostly barely a handfull of the same users. Plus, political topics often get pushed to the front pages, so it's not unlikely that the users see it themselves, whether or not Davel posted the thread in question.
for real. During covid, I didn't get sick once, and that was heavenly cause when I get sick, it runs for weeks and get really really bad. I thought that wearing masks when sick would be the norm now, but whatever
I'm not sure if I've properly explored the idea, but a specific "digital culture" would help a lot. Inside jokes, ways of speaking, emojis, memes, etc. really help an instance to distinguish itself from others.
The best example is Hexbear (ik but just hear me out for a second). Their culture is borrowed from the edgier side of the leftist internet, but they still have a style of their own. They were so recogniseable even, that a user claimed to be scared of seeing pronouns next to someone's username because they knew it would be a comment from Hexbear (they used to be the only instance with such features, before others followed suit).
I have a hypothesis that a good amount of issolation, or at least encouraging users to only post on communities on your instance, would be good for developping some kind of culture, maybe even kinship between them.
Ngl I'm getting quite fed up with the casual misogyny on lemmy. I thought we'd be better than this.
I wish a woman would make a more woman focused instance so that other women can feel safe using lemmy.