When version 0.19 arrives, you will be able to block any instance you want (see pinned post in !lemmy@lemmy.ml)
For now you need to block them in the app you are using. If you're mostly using it on the website, unfortunately you will need to manually block the communities you don't like.
Absolutely. No more political bullshit from Hexbear, Kbin and Lemmygrad!
I'm just sitting here and wait for the release.
Nobody on Hexbear or Lemmygrad is actually a socialist; they just blindly defend any country that claims to be or once was socialist
Hexbear and grad speak for themselves. As a kbin user, what's the kbin gunk and where's it coming from?
Is there a, I don't know, wiki or something with cultural information about the different instances and what they're like?
I know it would probably be next to impossible to keep it from being biased in some way, but I kind of feel like the new kid in school, and the school has over 100 different cliches that I have to figure out and avoid or whatever.
Definitely an understandable feeling when you see these kinds of conversations but honestly most instances are just full of relatively normal folks talking about relatively normal things, especially the bigger ones since they have such a diverse user base. The main "bad" ones to know about are Lemmygrad and Hexbear for being very politics-focused. Then Beehaw for being a bit of a walled garden that prefers not to mix too much with the rest of the Threadiverse. There was one called exploding-heads too that was mostly just full of trolls, but I think they gave up on Lemmy and went somewhere else.
Some that stand out for more wholesome reasons are places like slrpunk.net (solarpunk / environmentalism stuff), mander.xyz (lots of awesome sciencey communities).
Most make it very obvious what they are before you sign up, like there's yiffit.net for furries, lemmy.blahaj.zone for LGBT, ani.social for anime, then things like literature.cafe, startrek.website, programming.dev, (cough cough) lemmynsfw etc are obvious from the names.
Ok I started this comment thinking there were only a couple to mention but actually you're right a list somewhere might be good! https://join-lemmy.org/instances is supposed to be that, but most don't list much useful info really.
You can with the new Lemmy 0.19 update
Witch app do you use? Some apps let you block instances, but I'm not familiar with how. I just blocked all the communities I came across.