• 0 Posts
  • 21 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 9th, 2023

help-circle
  • 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.




  • 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.





  • 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.



  • 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!








  • Another thing that might be a bit different from reddit, is that lots of folks here recommend using the Block options for users / communities. Lemmy is a smaller place, so if a particular user keeps posting stuff that isn’t what you want to see in a community it can really ruin the experience. It’s totally okay to just block people, and is the generally recommended way of dealing with trolls.

    Federation, multiple instances, among other things, means that lemmy as whole is less strictly governed by mods than reddit. That’s good in many ways, but it does mean that we users have to take some responsibility to create the lemmy we want, and that sometimes means blocking people.


  • Uncut in general. But it can go a bit insane, with a few giant weeds that start turning into bracken. What works for us (but ymmv obvs) is having some dwarf goats or sheep. We move them around the property and they nibble the grass and weeds but don’t make it a miserable mowed lawn. It looks like a lovely meadow. And they’re surprisingly affectionate and relatively low maintence.