I tend to hope for the best, but you actually hit the nail, I've had the exact same thought at the back of my mind about lemmy for quite some time. Much of the community is made up of people who have been banned or disliked elsewhere, so this is their refugee. The very first thing I noticed is how toxic users are with downvotes. It is no longer a community tool about moderating quality discussions, it's essentially used as a "fuck you", so I had to disable (hide) it and disregard vote system on this site, especially after seeing how easily it is for people to mass downvote lemmy profiles with multiple accounts (happened to me 2 times, even highly upvoted plain humor comments were suddenly downvoted). My guess is that we're getting downvoted here, but do you really care?