Libb

Sure, not all communities are the same, that’s fine. There are plenty of communities I’m not interested or I see I won’t fit in. There are others I don’t have that impression.

. I like it a lot here but I feel like I need to engage a bit myself to create the great discussions I used to simply observe on Reddit.

+1

How to create great discussions on Lemmy?

I can’t tell about ‘great’ save that it has a lot to do with both the topic discussed and the people involved, but I consider being honest combined with 1) not being afraid (ie, no self-censoring) and 2) not trying to create polemics (throwing random shit knowing at least one will trigger some emotional reactions) as an excellent starting point to a potentially interesting discussion.

(Yesterday, I was reading (not commenting) a thread on some public transportation discussion. It was very interesting.)

Next to that, and equally important imho: don’t try to push new content for the sake of adding content. No matter how clumsy or simple, I prefer posts that the OP finds genuinely worth sharing or discussing with others. I don’t need to be entertained with constant new content. Like with eating, I prefer quality over quantity ;)

Can I reply after a day or two if I am too busy to reply immediatly?

Sure. Some like me won’t mind (I do that too) while others won’t like it, and some can’t even be bothered to click a discussion that is more than a day old. That’s fine. It’s their right to prefer freshness but they also don’t own Lemmy and they don’t get to decide how we should all use it.
Lemmy is ours to make it exactly what we want it to be. So, make if yours by answering/participating at your own pace :)

What you describe as “not feeling terrible” is what I would describe as “empathy”, aka what makes us humans. Our ability to feel emotions regarding what is not happening to us but to someone else.

There is no need to go seek trauma-like events to experiment empathy, no need to witness a war, a child suffering or something deeply unfair. It’s the same empathy that also makes us able to cry real tears when watching/reading a love story, and sincerely worry about what’s happening to a fictional character that is, by definition, not even a real person. That is the same empathy that makes us feel good when witnessing someone happy in front of us, even a perfect stranger (like this sweet couple sitting in front of me in the bus, yesterday), or feel happy when we see kids playing around on the street or in a park. The same empathy that makes us feel bad when we see those same people not being happy. And it’s the same empathy that makes feel like helping some random strangers that obviously needs help. To care about others, that’s what make us human beings.

So, would I take pills to stop being a human in order to not feel bad? No. At the very least because I know I would also not be able anymore to feel happy, as I would not be able to feel much anymore, if anything.

if everyone stopped caring, how would the world look like?

robot like. De-humanized. A billionaire’s dream I imagine. Even more so that they would make us pay for having access to those magical (?) pills.

Personal remark:

Ignoring real trauma here, just considering our emotional reactions to events happening around us. Imho, the real issue with bad/sad feelings is not in us feeling bad. The issue lies in not being educated to accept and to handle those kind of feelings as a legit part of ourselves. Exactly like so many of us now seem to have become incapable to handle any disagreement or contradictory fact, btw. It’s most likely the same issue.

No pill ever will replace education, or its absence.

I have not really considered that aspect, something I should probbaly do. Thx.

Maybe we should watch more a certain movie as it feels like we have largely forgotten that wise advice.

Sadly there is Windows-only software I need occasionally for work but I’m going to go full-linux on all but one of my devices.

That’s what we do at home. My spouse has work computer running Windows that she is expected to use, but our personal machines are running Linux. Only regret? Not having made the switch a few years earlier.

I’ve yet to start self-hosting: nearing my 60s, I confess this is a task I find intimidating (it needs to be done right to be secure and I’m afraid I will not be able to do it right and won’t even know it until it is too late). That being said, living in France, I already moved all the services we use from GAFAM and/or US-owned ones to independent EU-based services, if at all possible ones offering full privacy/encryption.