In my experience from lurking around Lemmy, it seems that the big instances are largely populated by stereotypically “reddit-left” people, which includes finding a lot of things offensive (whether they’re actually offended or not) and being relatively hostile to people who don’t seem to share their worldview, seemingly considering it the default that everyone should know and accept. You can see it in this thread as well.
Not being an American and being culturally outside of american partisanship, this has been quite the disappointment for me, but what can you do.
Imo it’s the latter. It didn’t start that way, but in the last decade they gradually shifted to being simply inflammatory on purpose because that brings clicks, and on top of that they regularly did dumb shit like complain about sexualization and male gaze one week (often, though not always, legitimately, but mostly it was literally just complaining without any further insight, which I personally don’t care bout) and next week publish an article with photos of top male bulges in some sport that, apart from the gender being swapped, was literally worse than what they complained about with regards to sexualizing women.
Personally I say good riddance, but I’m biased by a deep dislike for people who use identity politics to create divisive clickbait.