Welcome! Genuine advice for a newcomer: look around, figure out what instances you like, and shift away from lemmy.world to an instance that requires a sign-up request and which comports with your values. There is an account migration feature to make this as easy as possible.
It’s different to what people are used to, but in my experience a huge number of the worst people migrating from reddit went straight to one of the open instances. A lot of them were banned over there for quite legitimate reasons.
They know that they can’t operate their own asshole instances for long because they’ll get defederated, and they don’t want to deal with being known to an admin who has actual principles, so open sign up is their thing, and those instances are filling up with them.
Honestly I would like to see a feature that flags if a user’s instance has open sign up.
It’s getting to the point that if someone is still on an open instance, they’re a little sus to me. It’s easier to trust people who come from instances whose policies I agree with.