1 - build a lean-to
2 - find a swamp (not so hard, I found one just wandering a few minutes)
3 - on the swamp, get a BUNCH of dragonflies! You may be luck (as me) and find a ruby one!
4 - put dragonflie on study, log out, get back when it's over, put another, log out, repeat
5 - when you hit 4k+ LPs, rush for yeomanry, and keep putting dragonflies to study
6 - when you think you have enough LP to get a good sized claim, build a claim.
7 - be safe!
You may have been really bad luck, but all the players I meet on game untill now were friendly. I even helped a guy hunting a deer while I distracted a boar (with my body

) and added some ppl as kins!
You gotta understand that, on ANY game where players can harass other players, there'll be stupid ppl doing stuff just to piss you off. It was like this on ultima online back in 98 when I started playing it, why would it be different now?
I remember a friend who played the early days of rust telling me it was just chaos! You would build a "house", log out, and come back just to find out someone destroyed it and stole everything you had!
On H&H, at leat you got some sort of defenses, like making a claim, building a palisade, building a stone wall. Just use it to your advantage, and be smart on the process!