[Outdated, please look at pinned post] Casual Conversation

Welcome to the Fediverse!

Indeed, people are quite a bit more welcoming here than Reddit - ofc not everywhere, but more so, on average. If it helps, you can block not only individual users communities, but even whole entire instances - the latter by going into your profile, scrolling way down, and adding the instance name to that list. Do what you want, but for me, when TENS of people continue to spam-reply me WEEKS after I STOP responding, that's the signal that they are refusing to control themselves, so I take matters into my own hands and block them. For that reason I blocked hexbear and lemmygrad.ml, and some people block lemmy.ml too but I do enjoy their memes and such and just stay out of their politics community so I have not gone that far for that one. If this describes you, note that this can improve your experience in the Fediverse by perhaps 90% so may be WORTH IT. People from those instances can still reply to your posts and comments, but you will not receive notifications anymore, nor see them while you are logged in:-).

One thing more I wanted to make sure that you and your friends know: DMs are not private. I don't know of any actual tools that makes reading someone's DMs possible, but the signals are out there and not only admins but anyone could, in theory. Probably that won't matter 99% of the time but e.g. sending physical addresses or phone numbers would be easy to scan for across the Fediverse by malicious actors.

Anyway, I hope you feel welcomed! (fwiw, I am not a woman, I just wanted to share these thoughts in case they would be helpful:-)