It’s so hard. I’m sorry you’re going through this.
I can say time will help. And that is very true, but it doesn’t help you in this moment. But it’s something to think about.
Meditation helps. I was in such a bad place after a breakup. I had a constant feeling of panic and depression. I started to meditate. Guided meditations from online. I would seriously meditate for 1.5 or 2 hours every day, sometimes twice. It helped a little and it used up the time I would normally spend feeling miserable.
My attitude was to find ways to occupy my time so I couldn’t use that time letting my mind spin. I started saying “yes” anyone asked me to do something that would use up my time. I made some friends because of that, too.
Unpopular opinion, but I don’t want that. I don’t want to start adding SEO stuff. If we have good content Google can figure out how to index it better themselves.
You can federate with whoever you want and not be at the whim of other system admins.
You have your data and won’t lose it if your instance suddenly shuts down.
Downsides:
Your instance won’t be federated very well at first. You may need to use some tricks like Lemmony to get broad federated content to show up in your instance.
When I worked in customer service this info was used in performance reviews. Also if I got an outstanding review my boss would give me a gift card or something.
Pay to run news stories on fringe Lemmy instances (which everyone has defederated) that offer illegal or borderline illegal content. Equate the fringe instances with Lemmy itself.
Find vulnerabilities and wait to use them until opportune times.
The thing is, downvotes mean whatever the person downvoting feels like they mean. Personally I don’t downvote anything, only upvote.
It would be interesting to have a bot that looks for bad actors—by that I mean users who abuse the downvote and do not use it the way the community agrees that it means. And have a mod review and take action if necessary.
If you decide to go to college, you have a couple years of general ed classes to get out of the way. Pick a wide variety of things you are interested in. If one clicks maybe it’s the career for you.
It’s bizarre. Both countries have moved away from communism. Russia is ruled by oligarchs. Xi-Jinping’s stated goals are to move China to a modern socialist nation while staying in keeping with China’s culture. His actions are the opposite—China has become more and more capitalist while maintaining authoritarian leadership.