I certainly don't doubt the top line trends here in this study. However, I wonder how the fediverse might differ. Anyone can set up a Lemmy or Mastodon instance, regardless of their technical aptitude and desire to secure the instance from toxic content. It's also inherently more anonymous. A more direct comparison might be 4chan not Reddit.

Both of the platforms they studied on have more sophisticated methods to determine bad actors because of their dominance. Particularly Facebook, where a profile is supposed to be mappable to a single, real identity.

That being said, there's a very real concern about how algorithms end up placing these "loud mouths" in other people's feeds. After all, outrage is still something that is preferred by algorithms. So those 3 to 7% of users creating the toxic content, might represent an outsized proportion of views.

It's good to know the reality on these platforms is that most people are reasonable. I guess the bigger question is why people come to the opposite conclusion. And I think that algorithms overly indexing on outrage are part of that.