His Instagram tells a really sad story. He was an infrequent poster of perfectly ordinary content. No sign of any mental illness: pictures of his sisters wedding, some jokes, nothing concerning.
Then, some posts about the death of his mother and almost right after, his sharp decline in mental health becomes apparent.
Amateur! I usually make things worse by sitting around doing nothing. That's called efficiency.
Do not taunt Superhappyfunland!
No, it doesn't. Not even the old ones, because Brother is rolling out malicious firmware updates even to older models:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
If you have one of the remaining good Brother printers, make sure firmware updates are disabled.
I'm able to see any news that would be relevant as quickly as any other social media,
That's not what I use Reddit for and that's sadly the only Reddit (and other social media) thing today, that Lemmy mimics successfully.
I'm using Reddit mostly for the niche and special interest communities. For specific tech advice and troubleshooting. For all the stuff that once used to be home on newsgroups and bulletin boards and can now only be found in subreddits and, even worse, Discord communities.
And a lot of these smaller tech communities were super motivated to move to Lemmy, but Lemmy's complete inability to surface anything but the most popular posts in the most popular communities (there's still no equivalent for multireddits and there was no weighted popularity until 0.19) rapidly killed and suffocated virtually all of them.
That's the reason why you can type "obscure technical problem Reddit" into Google and almost always get a relevant answer, while that will likely never be the case for Lemmy.
I can discuss things in communities that feel welcoming to me as a queer socialist that I could hardly find on Reddit.
I'm not saying Lemmy doesn't have good communities, it certainly does, but once you go beyond news, politics and memes there's neither enough content nor enough users to keep anything else alive.
They did give a reason though:
"Our overall goal is to provide a safe space to disenfranchised persons."
That goal is fundamentally incompatible with an open medium where they don't have full control over every participant. That's why they have already defederated from any large instance that allowed open registrations months ago and have only continued to cut ties rather than to mend them.
BeeHaw's definition of "nice" isn't your or my definition of "nice". It allows no dissent or opposing views on most subjects and more so, it doesn't even allow for its members to be exposed to different ideas, however briefly.
They are trying to build the perfect echo chamber, free from anyone not "nice". You simply cannot build such a chamber if you don't have full control over every aspect of it.
BeeHaw's entire concept would have been far more suitable for an old bulletin board style forum, the kind that is all but extinct today, but not for an open (in every sense if the word) platform.
I'm writing this as someone whose views actually align pretty well with those of BeeHaw's - with the exception of their heavy handed approach to anything and anyone not fully aligned with them.
Their stated goal simply isn't achievable outside of a sealed environment, so, no, Lemmy probably isn't for them. They should look into phpBB and co.
Lemmy is very much a viable alternative
Oh, how I wish that were true. Alas, stats keep showing that Lemmy is not continuing to grow, on the contrary. There is close to zero activity in anything but the most main stream communities and Lemmy is only now making very, very slow and tentative steps to actually surface more niche communities after effectively burying and suffocating them in every release up to and including the current stable.
"Oh no, they'll contaminate a lot of goods that were prepared for recycling and endanger the health of the people involved in that process chain."
When corrected, most people don't double down on their own, accidental, misinformation. The fact that you chose to be defensive and sarcastic instead, speaks a lot about the kind of person who dumps mercury in the recycling bin with the expectation that others will clean it up.
They contain mercury and are hazardous waste, not recycling. If, or rather when, they break they will contaminate everything around them and are a healthy hazard. So, no, definitely not curbside recycling.
There should be drop off points in many big box stores for this kind of stuff.
Bob