The answer is spread amonst the comments you've already got.
It's a combination of regular bans, IP bans, moderators knowing the 'regulars' and recognizing their (bad) behaviour. And the Lemmy admins have a Matrix chat(?) room where they exchange info.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mental_health_resources
You should call the crisis line line of your country and get someone to listen to you. Not just the civil services but someone who might actually care. Seems you arrived at the bottom. But you're not alone or the only one who's in a really bad place.
Completely agree. First of all the voting behaviour. To me it looks completely like a score if a specific opinion is popular. I see lots of valid arguments (in friendly words) against a popular opinion getting downvoted. Urban legends getting upvoted while the correct answer has 2 upvotes... Things that are the first thing that comes to mind after reading the headline, but not part of the article at all getting a good amount of upvotes...
And with the sarcasm, innuendo, emotions, playing devils advocate... It's a long tradition on the internet to add hints to the text to make that clear. It's not mandatory in any way, but the subtext, verbal clues and facial expressions are definitely missing. Reddit folks have their own jargon with the '/s' etc. Other people use emojis. But even before emojis were a thing, people added ;-) :'-) or XD or other clues.
Sarcasm just doesn't work that well in text comments and it never has.
Hmm. There might not be a way around that. At least is constructive critizism. And there's a good chance it's some bacteria (as it most often is) and it'll solve the issue for good. I can't give any advice on the social norms. I'm mostly thinking in a problem-oriented way...
Hand them some tea-tree oil and the instructions how to use it and tell them to wash their feet for a week with that.
"Don’t Like Mondays" from Bob Geldof (1979) would be another example of a good song about shooting elementary school kids.
Yes. At the same time some aren't that sure or scared of death. And the rules are that detailed that lots of people have committed some kind of offense and can't expect to go to heaven for sure.
Also the bible has implemented some additional rules so you can't take a shortcut to heaven... Suicide won't do it because (surprise) it's a sin... And generally speaking god is just testing you with this life. That's kinda the only thing why it matters and why you would want to behave and live it like he intended.
Also there is martyrs, suicide cults etc taking that shortcut straight to heaven.
I think it's a combination of several factors. First of all there is the network effect. A social media platform gets interesting once there are enough people and we're just about 50.000 active users. Which isn't much compared to other forums, discord servers and fanbases of single individuals (streamers, ...)
Next there needs to be some motivation to join or some attention. We had that for a moment when the Reddit API thing happened. But I don't see that as of now. We need interesting content. And a nice and welcoming community. Or something that motivates people to come here.
And there is the technical issues. We've had lots of them. Federation broke for some time. There are still some bugs and user interface issues. Moderation tools still are an issue. Onboarding (choosing an instance, finding a good app) is a bit complicated. And I don't see big leaps in software development, things that are visible/obvious to the user.
It's the same as long as you watch your subscribed communities. Lemmy is federated and that means generally you have the same access to content regardless of which unstance you chose. I mean we also have individual moderation and "local" and "all" feeds. But I don't use them. It's just too random and uninteresting to scroll through everything.
I'd agree. Also Lemmy is too much just dropping news articles and discussing world politics for my taste. Maybe being just another comment feed underneath a news article isn't that engaging and interesting. I'd like to see more about hobbies and meaningful, sustainable talk about specific topics.
What's with the Republicans, don't they like their country and democracy any more?