Browsing their coms can be a pretty unique experience, especially if you go in with a preformed idea of what their communities are like. There’s a huge spread of interests and experiences, and sometimes you can be browsing a niche community and forget that these were the people posting BPB on lemmy.world threads a year ago.

Knowing the academic writings and history they’re referencing helps a lot with understanding where they are coming from, even if you may not agree with all of it.