I know the real answer is reddit but I really don’t want to go back now that I’ve already grown used to life without it. I was hoping for Lemmy to be a viable substitute but it isn’t. I can see how this place is wonderful for the certain type of person but that person is not me. My experience during the past 6+ months has been a net negative and I’m pretty much ready to move on. I just don’t know where else to go.
Lemmy is a federation of servers. “Lemmy” is not one political group with one viewpoint. If you’re looking for different viewpoints, try different groups, or different servers.
In another comment you said this about the comments you read:
I don’t think this is true. I think that what you think is “bad faith” is actually “people who disagree with me”. So far, most users of Lemmy appear to trend politically left by American standards, but that’s only because American standards are so absurdly skewed to the right that it appears to stand out. By American standards, “truth” is left-wing.
Ask yourself what you’re actually looking for.
The problem is that all of the big instances sorta line up the same way and anything that doesn’t please them gets defederated at the speed of light and comments and posts get removed. They have the control.
It seems OP was getting some comments removed (Rule 1 = bigorty) by simply expressing opinions that don’t please the “gods”.