This is some nice advice but

Treat them like you would any of your male friends.

Don’t do this. Understand that you wouldn’t do this with any random guy either. As with any new acquaintances everyone is cautious in the beginning and women more so. Whether you find the new girl appealing or not all you have to do is cautiously get to know her through your interactions with her, like any other relations you may build with initial strangers and get used to their presence and predilections.

Maybe that’s an instance-dependent thing.

I can’t check all instances so I suppose that maybe possible but I’ve tried 4 and each one has been the same, but since you hadn’t had this issue I suppose I can chalk it up to bad luck. Still needs fixing though, I’m not the only one who faced this and lemmy.world and lemm.ee both have this issue, 2 of the most popular instances according to fedidb.

It’s interesting because a lot of non-English speaking communities complain about users downvoting their content because they don’t understand it

From what I understand after reading that thread, a significant portion of users are downvoting just because they don’t like seeing any other language than their preferred one(English?). But that’s a stupid way of going about it, just message the posters to let them know about tagging it with it’s proper language or just block the user. Pointlessly downvoting everything you see won’t get the message accross.

Just signed up to this instance and it was the same issue at lemmy.world too which was probably 1/2 a year ago or more. After signing up you have to go to your settings and choose in the Languages section all the languages you wish to see or else they won’t show up (like any posts & comments in english would be invisible to me as a new user if not selected in the settings)

What is the current experience for a new account?

If the language issue wasn’t there it wouldn’t honestly be much different from reddit. Even better in some cases, no ads and power harassment. The only thing missing is a dedicated wiki section.