First, do whatever you want - I am not here to tell you what to do:-). That is indeed a highly personal decision, and I for one will not begrudge you to pick either option that you feel will work best for you.

Second, I used to think similarly. I’m telling you, those Innuendo Studios videos will change everything about how you think in these terms. e.g. you simply cannot talk with Trump supporters, or hexbear members - they don’t even “use logic”, as a normal person would. Though they do use it like a 5-year-old toddler would: as a weapon, if they think they can gain advantage by making mouth-noises that attempt to sound somewhat vaguely like it. It’s fucking exhausting to constantly analyze, decide, and attempt to respond (or not) to such - especially when their favorite trick is to “control the conversation”, by ignoring whatever you actually said and instead pivot it over to some other matter entirely (but only until they sense that they can’t win that way, and then they’ll switch strategies entirely on-the-fly) - and quite frankly ain’t nobody got time for dat nonsense, imho. But again, ofc you should free to do whatever you want…

I do want to warn you though that it is a fundamental principle of the world/universe that people automatically start to become more like those that you surround yourself with - e.g. even if you wanted to stop drinking alcohol, if you surround yourself with friends whose major activity is to talk at a bar, then it would become difficult to hold that line… (note I myself drink alcohol all the time, and just a few weeks ago visited a friend, ofc our first instincts were to meet at a happy hour, it just makes financial sense and is fun!.. - so anyway I’m not trying to offer any judgement there, just illustrate the principle that if someone were to decide against it, that would be difficult to maintain in the face of others who continually make the exact opposite decision).

And I did not like what Reddit was doing to me. I was being more snarky, more contentious, more pedantic, less kind, less considerate of others’ opinions, etc. I started to worry that it would affect my relationships at my new job. Reddit has a… “culture” that is quite well-known for being that way. And we may think that it won’t affect us - but it will. Maybe if I had already had established relationships with these new people, but I did not, and these “new” ones, the first after I found and joined Reddit, seemed vulnerable to my having had to interact with so many Reddi-trolls (as a mod of a couple small gaming subs over there).

Third, I never said that “everyone sucks there” - for any of those instances. Though like Reddit, there are… known patterns of behaviors, that most of them display. Once or twice is indeed an outlier - and given enough time we will see people from every instance do something to piss us off (unless the instance is extremely tiny; also maybe someone is just having a bad day, so their behavior not only does not reflect their entire instance but even themselves, usually?) but when you see something like >50-90% of the people from an instance doing the precise same thing, it most definitely becomes a “pattern”.

You asked a question, and got >800 responses, most saying that you were not imagining things: there really is a very noticeable “pattern” of behavior that people have come to expect from them. If you want to ignore those responses and… “enjoy” your time with them, then go ahead. I tried the same, with users of lemmy.ml. But if it helps to hear my story, eventually I got over it, just blocked them all, and I have not regretted that once since. Yes I do miss out on some posts from those communities - but I still see posts from people from those instances on other communities that I am subscribed to, and also likewise comment replies to me, so note that a user-block is really a pathetically un-powerful, soft thing, unlike full, hard, strict defederation.

For an example, you need look no further than the other reply to my previous message, where they said:

You got made fun of once and can’t seem to let it go, from reading the mod log they seemed confused by what you were even trying to say. The mod message was one of their “wtf” emojis

I can still see it, I just don’t get a “notification” for it, each time they ignore my consent and decide to (attempt to) push their thoughts at me regardless. Btw, if it helps YOU, I will explain what they are attempting to do here: first, they try to pin the blame on me as if I am the one being unreasonable (the very first word starts with YOU, as an attempt to speak in a confident tone of voice, as is proper for such an accusation), also they ignore how (as I said many, MANY times) people would continually respond to me, days and days and days and days and days and WEEKS later (i.e., my response is one thing, but who was it that first started the whole having a hard time “letting something go”?:-P). Ignoring my consent is considered “abusive” behavior, in most parts of the world. Also, I totally forgot about the incident that they are referring to, but this person, in their reply, conveniently entirely ignores that other events than that have occurred. e.g. I mentioned an incident saying something about Biden v. gas prices, whereas this incident says nothing about Biden, nothing about gas prices, nothing about inflation, therefore this must be the only incident that has ever happened, and MUST be what I was talking about… right? 🤪 I like to think that even as a 5-year-old toddler, I would not fall into such an extremely obvious logical fallacy as this, to presume that I know everything, when in fact it is painfully obvious that this person is talking out of their ass. So should I respond to them - and to everyone else that wants to take a go at me as well, for daring to say that e.g. Biden lowered gas prices? Or am I simply not allowed to speak of Biden, or perhaps it’s rather the topic of gas prices, or inflation, that is forbidden to ever speak of - unless ofc I happen to agree with their POV? And is that like… ever, or only on their own instance, or perhaps wherever their instance name gets brought up - what are the rules here? Moreover, why are they the ones making those rules, and constantly shifting them whenever it suits them? And why is Russia=good, America=bad, rather than oh say genocide (whoever does it)=bad, and capitalism=bad too, but what other options do we even have (derp… Russia is capitalistic too…).

Also, if I were to respond, what manner of nonsensical “logic”(al fallacies) would I subsequently be presented with, in their next reply? I came to the Fediverse to enjoy reasoned discourse… but in the above paragraph, notice how argumentative I became? Less kind, less considerate, more argumentative, more pedantic… see the pattern? I will spell it out just to make it crystal clear: it is Reddit all over again, which I tried to leave behind, but on Lemmy.ml and far more the other two Big Three instances, I continually find that it is here on the Fediverse as well - though not equally distributed. I tend to not have such a form of… shall we call them “low-effort” exchanges with someone from most other instances, e.g. lemm.ee or sh.itjust.works, and if the opportunity does ever present itself, it is trivially easy enough to block just one person and move on with my life. But it is fucking exhausting to try to keep up with the constant barrage of such, so when I start noticing these extremely obvious patterns like 98-99% observations of trolling behavior coming from accounts located on one of the Big Three instances, yeah the opportunity to stop virtually all of it with a handful of keystrokes and clicks was too tempting to pass up. And you’ve seen it yourself, but anyway, choose to not block them if you want, though I made my choice to do so. It is good to have choices to pick from:-).

What are your goals, that you hope to accomplish by being here on the Fediverse? It is something to ponder anyway, and when you are able to answer that, then you should find your answer much more readily, as to whether not blocking those instances will help you attain your goals.