As a CS dude who uses Linux and is around way too many people who seem like they genuinely are in need of some therapy on a daily basis, this entirely checks out, tbh.

I’m now mildly worried for my own mental state

Up until the API debacle, that was my solution too. Now even that doesn’t work. It’s so bizarrely hard to look something up on the internet now.

Yeah, it just doesn’t really exist yet. I’m not sure a really well-moderated community for news content can exist yet on Lemmy, due to the culture that’s slowly springing up, but if it did it’d have to be on a dedicated instance, I expect - one with a very, very dedicated set of moderators with relatively strict rules regarding what is sufficiently-well-sourced content, and all other communities on the instance being held up to the same bar in their specific niches in order to encourage that kind of posting culture.

Honestly, I don’t think Reddit ever achieved a really good result either - the news subreddits were all dumpster fires to varying degrees - but Lemmy’s immaturity worsens the issue here, I think. It’s pretty appallingly obvious. I’d look elsewhere for news opinion aggregation, for the time being.

Same boat here, though a couple years later. It feels really weird to be so out of the loop with my “fellow” Gen Z siblings who were born in the late 00s.

Sway and dmenu when in a keyboard productivity sorta mood, KDE otherwise.