It’s really depends what your interests are, and what your expectations are. I think my interests are pretty lemmy adjacent (nerdy stuff like games, tech and such) and there’s daily posts on big general groups, but even slightly niche groups like c/dnd only get a couple of posts a week. And even when small communities are more active, it’s often just a couple of brave posters keeping things going.

Lemmy has a tiny fraction of the user base of a site like reddit (who claim 97 million active daily users, while lemmy probably has less than a million unique users ever). So, for now, your unlikely to see the frequency or range of posts and comments you would get on reddit. Tbh, for me that’s not an issue. I feel like the conversations and chat that happens even on main communities like asklemmy feels personal and more interesting, and I’d rather read four interesting comments than scroll through a hundred hot takes and dumb jokes.

I think lemmy is at a difficult point where people who use it need to step up and post more, and be the community they want to see.

Same as Liz Truss killing the queen. Sometimes, when you’re old and in poor health, you just experience something that makes you think “fuck it, I don’t need to put up with this shit anymore.”

Do you mean a gyroscope?

It depends on what you overthink. If it’s anxiety and stress stuff, you might be right that doing that with some safe support (friends, partners, professionals) might be wiser. But there are some techniques for quantifying and putting into perspective worries. Something that a therapist recommended and has helped me is to track specific, measurable and reasonably immediate anxieties, then tracking if they were justified or not.

So I don’t bother writing down vague big concerns like “maybe I’m a terrible person / it’s the apocalypse / etc” but if I’m stressed about an upcoming event, interaction, or outcome I can write it down, record how anxious I am on 1-10 and then the day after it happened I record how big a deal the consequences of it actually are. And for me at least, I would often be very worried about something, but afterwards realise that it didn’t really matter much. Even if it went badly, it was just a bit awkward, it didn’t actually make my life worse or ruin anything, unlike the anxiety which impacted my life much more and for much longer. If I spend a lot of mental energy and make myself miserable trying to avoid some relatively minor negative outcome, then the medcine is worse than the disease.

But my main type of overthinking isn’t really anxiety related, it’s just not thinking clearly about what I’m interested in exploring (adhd related, probs). And journalling has been great for that, I don’t worry about getting it right or it even making sense, I just start writing about an idea. And even if I repeat or contradict myself it doesn’t matter, I’m not writing a book or blog, this is just for me. And having to slow down my thinking to writing speed, and consider what I’m saying, helps me actually pursue a train of thought rather than just thinking chaotically about a topic.

That third one is surprisingly deep

Lamps? Or am I missing something?

Thanks! I don’t know why people are downvoting you. The OP literally asked what people felt, and I wanted to hear your take. I guess they just don’t agree? I’m not sure downvoting someone for sharing their reasonable view is a great system.

Would you mind expanding on that? I picked up that it’s not generally done, but whenever someone replies to something I’ve posted, I generally don’t care, and I’ll often reply to them if it’s worthwhile.

Obviously, some stuff is time sensitive, but if someone wants to disagree with or add to something I’ve said a year or more ago, I don’t see the issue. But I think your opinion is the majority?

Yeah, if you’re already planning on going to the same place, then you can be his cool, settled friend, who already knows how stuff works. University isn’t segregated by year in the way that school is.

If the real reason is that you’re worried that a year of long distance will doom your relationship, then you have to ask if it’s worth changing your life plans for? Especially, if it ends up putting extra pressure on the relationship - if my partner gave up something like that for me I would feel like I couldn’t disappoint them or break up, because i somehow ‘owed them’. Your partner is telling you that he doesn’t want you to change your plans for him - that could be because he doesn’t feel he can ask that of you, but he really wants you to stay. Or he could mean what he says, and secretly be looking forward to the challenge of starting somehting new and learning to be his own person.

But if the real reason is you value your relationship, and you’d rather spend a year with him than go to university, then be honest about that. Then it’s your choice, and it’s not putting pressure on (or infantalising) him. Choosing your relationship over your education is the sort of thing parents might disapprove of at that age, but it’s your life and only you can know what’s the priority for you. But don’t do it because your 17 year-old boyfriend “needs your help” when he’s saying he doesn’t.

Written communication between strangers is going to lead to a lot of missed subtlety. Without shared context it’s not always obvious when someone is joking, the Internet is full of crazies of every stripe, so even obviously extreme ideas are not definitely satire.

I’m not sure lemmy seems worse than anywhere else tbh, but it does have a larger international user base. No native English speakers, and people from different cultures, are going to lead to more breakdowns in nuance.

Like the others are saying, it’s being emotionally affected by other people’s emotional states. If I make a stranger happy by doing something nice for them, or even just being around happy people, thta makes me feel good. If someone is upset, it’s upsetting to be around them. This can be a positive, because it motivates people to help people in need, or it can be selfish, where people avoid or exclude those who are suffering (e.g. hating the homeless) because it makes them sad to see people in bad situations but they don’t want to help them.

What’s it like to not have empathy? Is a person being happy or sad completely irrelevant to your emotional state? Is a person’s wellbeing emotionally equal to an inanimate object? I have no knowledge of ASPD so I genuinely curious!

Can’t think of a specific line, but I’m sure something from Grease. I was obsessed with that movie as a kid, and my many questions about some of the plots and lines led to my parents giving me The Talk. So I imagine I misheard a bunch of lines about periods and such.

The Chip Butty is a British classic, but I don’t know popcorn and oj. What’s the appeal, just a refreshing drink to sip with popcorn? Or is this some crazy oj cereal type thing?

Little chocolate chip cookies as a cracker for hummus. The sweet biscuit texture with the cool, tangy lemon and garlic hummus is amazing. But sadly, most people are not ready for such truths.

Preternatural.

I travel a lot, and spend time in a lot of random places, stay with friends and such like. My job means that I can set my own schedule most of the time, but sometimes I need to respond to something pretty urgently. So, there’s been plenty of times when I’ve been travelling light and suddenly been asked to pull a bunch of data from a spreadsheet and write some quick report on it, so usually I just ask whoever I’m with if I can use their pc for an hour and get it out the way.

It’s certainly possible do it all on a phone, but it’s much quicker and more pleasant to just use a proper keyboard and screen. And there have been times (like after a ill-advised encounter with a fountain in Rome) when my phone is temporarily out of action, so if I need to deal with travel arrangements on a public computer it might involve accessing my emails.

Yeah, I didn’t find it particularly bizarre. Both are very natural ways to process verbal information. Anyone who’s ever tried to do arithmetic in a new language knows that we don’t just abstractly do math, a big part is that we know that seven plus eight is fifteen. That’s why they used to teach multiplication tables by rote. It would be lot more bizarre if an llm had independently devised a reliable mathematical algorithm.

Using email clients is fine on my primary devices, but I often have to use email on other people’s computers. I don’t really want to go back to carrying a usb of portable apps again. And some public computers have usb drive access disabled, understandably.

Anyone got a any opinions (or a link to a review) of the different options? Proton and tuta come up, are there others worth considering?

I understand that I’ll probably need to pay (otherwise I’m the product) and encryption / security is good, but the thing that keeps with Gmail (apart from inertia) is that it feels quick and easy to use. My only real experience of non Gmail sites over the last two decades have been terrible but mandatory work webmail systems that are slow, clunky and look a decade out of date. Or Hotmail, which sucks for a variety of reasons.

Yeah, that’s the whole point. Reincarnation is not meant to be a positive, it’s a nightmare that you have to escape. That’s what ‘nirvana’ is, reaching a point where you successful escape the reincarnation cycle and get to have oblivion.