Your instance apparently hides much of the toxicity from you: https://legal.programming.dev/docs/hidden-communities/.

As you say, when you leave the instance and view those others you can see notable differences in what they have to offer. Like mander.xyz is primarily science based.

I don't know if I can precisely explain all the nuances of why people on Reddit complain about us here the way that they do. Like how much of that is based upon prior experiences, which may have changed in the meantime? Or maybe they say toxicity but really mean the network effect where there is so little niche content? Perhaps they simply misunderstand entirely the nature of federated content, so that yes while e.g. hexbear exists that does not mean that all of its content is readily accessible from every other instance?

Part of the problem lies in how poor discoverability is in the Lemmy and even PieFed software. Like the above link explains in depth precisely which communities are hidden by the admins of your instance, however I recall having to stumble upon discovery of this fact on StarTrek.website where there were zero posts or public acknowledgement that ChapoTrapHouse had been made "hidden", when it previously had not been. Lemmy and PieFed each show the list of entirely defederated instances, which is quite a long listing on programming.dev, but there is no central place showing which communities are "hidden" in this manner (nor in PieFed either).

So how then are people supposed to know the facts? Even if people take the time to investigate their findings will depend upon the method used to search - e.g. here is an example comment showing someone on hexbear.net contributing to i.e. appearing on programming.dev - so is the latter "cut off" from the former or no? The answer is "yes but really no", although probably more accurately stated as "no but really yes" (or if we want higher levels of precision then perhaps "no but really yes but at the end of the day no"?). It's confusing AF even for us here on the Threadiverse who know what's going on - like when ChapoTrapHouse was removed from StarTrek.website I was very surprised, bc I had previously interacted in that very community, so I KNEW that it was possible... until it was not anymore. Also, defederations leave up old content as well, even while preventing the influx of new content.

So I do not blame others for failing to understand all of these nuances and complexities? If there were a webpage similar to the federation listings that showed hidden communities, that would have done so much to guide people to understand that particular matter? As it is though, the topic requires in-depth investigation into the ever-changing set of documentation maintained by every instance individually. Speaking of, your instance has a broken link in its sidebar text referring to a wiki site that does not work, returning a cloudflare page saying "Invalid SSL certificate".

Lemmy can be - i.e. has corners that are - toxic as fuck. There are walls between such now, but they are not well-known or documented, and I do not blame Redditors in the slightest for not being aware of this.