Yep.

There’s definitely a difference between encouraging your kid in their extracurricular activities and living vicariously through them.

“Little league parent” is probably at the top of my list. If you’re not familiar with the term, it’s typically used as “little league dad” but that behavior is by no means restricted to the dad.

Basically, it’s when parents get way too into their kids’ sports, scream at the kids, take it way too seriously, and generally ruin any chances of the kids having fun.

Organic Maps

I totally get where they’re coming from with that shutdown announcement. I’ve had to “talk myself off a ledge” a few times to not go the same route and shut mine down. Ended up making some server policy changes that helped, but there’s eventually going to be something else later.

If we keep treating the Fediverse as just a scrappy, amateur effort, it will never reach its full potential and it will be forever just a niche thing.

What suggestions do you have to change the way we’re treating/running it currently?

I’m not sure if there’s a solution here, but I’d like to urge people to avoid lemmy.ml hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.

Did that months ago; defederated completely when they turned into Lemmygrad-lite. At first I missed some more active FOSS communities, but since then, others on different instances have become more active. programming.dev has a lot of communities that overlap with some of the bigger FOSS ones on .ml so maybe check out what they’ve got.

If there’s a community that only exists there, be the change you want to see: create it somewhere else, nurture it, and give it time to grow. You’re not the only one making this complaint about .ml, and you probably won’t be the last.

Related: I genuinely feel that ml being the official or at least de-facto flagship instance is turning people away.

Edit: Oh yeah. Didn’t recognize your username at first, but I was looking at the modlog the other day from my LW account, and saw a bunch of individual community bans from Dessalines and wondered what was up. Figured it was something exactly like this, and it was. Thanks for sharing.