I actually liked Lemmygrad better than hexbear (technically chapo.chat) initially, tons of effortposts and a friendly environment. I felt like I learned a lot and had good interactions. When genzedong got banned it felt like the place got really hostile overnight. I ended up blocking a couple of the more antagonistic lemmygrad users (who may be gone now for all I know) and also blocked a few communities that were (imo) overly obnoxious. That did help some, but the end result was me spending less time on lemmy and more time on hexbear.

Also at one point there was even a community entirely dedicated to attacking the lemmy.ml devs (I think they called it “shit lemmy.ml devs say”), which was initially created in response to a three day ban for an exchange I missed entirely because I had already blocked the user in question. To me it was infuriating, the lemmy devs have been fantastic and deserve all the praise in the world.

I will say that I haven’t spent significant time on lemmygrad specifically for a long while, so maybe (hopefully) they’re not as toxic as they were in the past. I do still use lemmy some, never really stopped, just slowed down when most of the threads were angry stuff from lemmygrad.