Being real, part of what's been great about lemmy is connection with people, instead of empty bullshit jokes and snark and the usual smugness that comes from not knowing the people.

There's a been dozens of times I've seen people here see someone acting unusual, and reaching out to see what's going on, offering sympathy and ending with mutual respect instead of slap fights.

Fuck the way reddit worked. It didn't work, but everyone thought it was the only way to have threaded forums, that you had to accept everyone being anonymous dicks as the price of discourse and content.

But it isn't, it really isn't the only way. And lemmy, for all its faults, still has that sense of actual community where you can go to a new C/ and run across lemmy friends. Some of them may even turn into friends in other ways.

The old squid was indeed everywhere, and he made plenty of mistakes along the way, but damned if he didn't do his part to make lemmy feel like a place for people first, even when the way he went about that was one of his mistakes.

I don't want to float through the kind of cesspits reddit could have, feeding back into toxicity via anonymity and disconnection.

I really like just occasionally recognizing someone. Also, user labels are awesome. I write about funny jokes and mad nuts in those.

Same here ... but still a bit concerned

Hey @FlyingSquid@lemmy.world, maybe you will want to reach out if you see this post. (Many here are a bit worried)

Take care 😌

He shared a lot about his life on here and I worry he set himself up for failure moving to the UK. Based on what he's said, he had a condition where he no longer wanted to eat, and then stopped working for a long time because of that. He seemed to expect that finding a job was going to be easy moving to a new country, but that's not typically the case, especially after having not worked in years.

After moving, he talked a lot about finding a job, which had me wondering what changed. While he wasn't working, he was spending 12+ hours on Lemmy every day, with like well over a hundred posts/comments per day, and constantly talking about not being able to work. Going from that mindset to desperately trying to find a job in a foreign country seems like a mindfuck.