That deserves a medal as far as I’m concerned.

Sickbay?! What is it?

Well this sucks, but I understand and share your frustrations. You’re one of the names I’m always happy to run into around lemmy (and of course in TenForward). I hope stepping away takes a source of stress out of your life.

I’ve never tried to run an instance, but I’ve been fielding reports as a mod in a few communities and have seen a lot of the behavior that you’re talking about - that awful combination of viciousness and righteousness. I’ve had to remove hit-lists, calls for somebody to murder politicians, cops, or advocating violence against various people perceived to have failed someone’s “purity test”, and much more. And I only help mod in a handful of meme communities, not anything serious. I can’t imagine how much work must go into managing anything remotely political.

My worry is that this is happening everywhere on social media, and that we’re just on one of many platforms grappling with it. If you want my theory, stuff like this is downstream of social media being personalized and curated by opinion, either by algorithms (like TikTok, Twitter/X, etc.) or manually by moderators (like here or reddit). When you get too many people agreeing with each other, it creates an echo-chamber that amplifies the most extreme takes about everything and views differing opinions - or even tempering voices - as “trolls”, “bootlickers” (as you mentioned), or worse. The news has been full of people radicalized from various bubbles on the internet until they act in ways they might not have if exposed to more diversity of thought. It begins with people hyping each other up with extreme language that lacks nuance, maturity, or reason, and then ends with a small % of impressionable people storming the capitol, firebombing Teslas, or maybe becoming that one anti-natalist murderer that got Lemmy a mention in the news recently. It’s absolutely unhinged behavior, and I think these are all symptoms of the same thing.

In short, the fediverse needs normies. We need diversity of thought and opinion, or else more reasonable people are going to burn out or feel pushed out by all the noise and toxicity.

Never heard of that one, but will look it up. Thanks!

Getting there. I’m introducing my oldest (3) to all the Mario games now.

I would absolutely buy a globe with live weather. That would be so cool!

I’m grateful for all the work y’all do to keep making the fediverse cooler.

I can’t seem to find the original source, but based on search results, I’m seeing that this map has been circulating in similar circles to this and solar power communities since at least 2016.

Hey, that sludge pipe wasn’t cheap!

Ugh, the iceberg was probably uninsured.

Remember when we all dressed like that 10 years ago?

I knew it!

What a legend.

I remember having a light, magnifying glass (but not this one), and a battery pack, but I can’t remember which attachments were for the original Gameboy vs the Gameboy Color.

They’re birds.

Good luck finding land that is not near fracking sites. It’s been done basically everywhere, right?