I rarely feel attacked when I talk with people in person. And we all take people feelings into consideration enough so no one is trying to attack anyone.
I was not actively commenting on social media since I was 13. But when I joined Lemmy i saw the statistics only 1% of people are actively posting and commenting on social media. And since I knew I was in 99% of people who are only consuming and really wanted Lemmy to take off I tried to be more active.
But now I find myself way too often attacked and attacking. And I always judged people that are attacking others on Xitter or Facebook.
Many of us actually posting have either too much time on our hands, care about something deeply, or don’t care that much and just want to troll. Throw that together into one pot and you get a lot of attacks. It doesn’t help that you don’t see the person and many people don’t understand how different communication is without body language.
So, yes, I think it’s easy to feel attacked. The harder part is not to attack and most of us fail that, which is why the web is often so toxic. Personally, I try to care less and block more. Someone calls you a braindead nincompoop? Either block and call them an idiot off-screen, or leave a snarky message and then block. At least that’s what I do, and I forget about what happened like 5 minutes later.