I have tried all the things! And I recently saw that article you're referencing.

In my own experience, I haven't seen one single person being rude or mean or blowing off newcomers. I suspect the bar to entry is slightly higher because you have to get your head around how the fediverse works, so the types of people coming here trend more patient. It's also a slower pace here, which can be good or bad depending on what you like.

The nicest feature for my use is that you can follow just about anyone anywhere. On kbin especially. There you can follow users from any Lemmy instance, or an entire instance, as well as users at Mastodon. The downside is that it can be a little tricky at first to figure out how to follow someone who's on another instance. It's not hard, but it's something new if you're coming from a single entity site like Twitter.

It's also no big deal to make an account on multiple instances if you're not sure where to go. My approach with all of them was to browse the local server (e.g., lemmy.world, mastodon.social) rather than the federated feed. The local feed gives you an idea of who's on that instance, what topics come up a lot, how the users act, etc. I'd also check out the "about" section. That will show you who the moderators are and what their focus and approach is. Some are laissez-faire and others are much more curated, so there's something for everyone.

The neat thing about this system is that you can find more niche instances if you have a particular interest -- gaming, software development, climate, science, memes, etc. You can make that your main instance and still see everything going on across all instances. That helps eliminate a lot of FOMO.

I was never on Twitter and not on most social media except Reddit, which I thought I'd miss. But I've enjoyed using Mastodon, Firefish, and Lemmy/kbin a lot. It's a smaller group but still plenty to see and lots of interesting people and topics. Everyone has been very nice, but it's easy to mute or block people or subs that you're not interested in. After that you won't see them in your feed at all.