#LemmyWorld is in Cloudflare’s access-restricted walled garden. It’s an asshole instance that not only excludes some people from access but it hoards people who are in the included group, creating a perversely centralized power imbalance that rewards elitists. To non-assholes, Lemmy World communities are parasitic because they rob the fedi of the decentralized balance it needs. To participate in Lemmy World communities is to either be uninformed/out of touch OR to be an informed asshole.

That said, lemmy.ml is not a great place either. At least it’s not excluding people on the basis of IP address, but it’s still disproportionately large and has a history of political baggage by admins who are very trigger-happy with the censor button. You could have chosen a better instance, like Sopuli, but then your sidebar acknowledges the apparent past existence of a Sopuli AITA community.

NTA for giving refuge from a destructive instance. If it were reversed, and you were to create a community on Lemmy World that already exists in the free world, it would be a YTA case. Poaching users from a bad instance is a good semaritan move.

How to fix this

Promote the most digital rights respecting venue in the sidebar, which is !amitheasshole@discuss.tchncs.de. Encourage cross-posts to and from discuss.tchncs.de. Make no mention of Lemmy World and other centralized nodes.

I would not normally post in lemmy.ml but thought this thread was worthy of an exception.

I would say mostly true.

I moved to a region where my lifestyle (accounting for wages, tax, cost of living) was effectively cut in half. Yet it was still the right move. My initial thinking was I will live anywhere for a year to get a different experience - I can always bounce back if I don’t like it… if the pay reduction bothered me. I ended up staying ~10 years.

A big factor is where you are in life. Fresh out of university, it’s important to gain ground right away and perhaps get the house paid for, or nearly so. But once you’re a senior dev and at a point of calling yourself “privileged class" with a decent sized 401k built up (which is great to convert to a Roth while abroad), you’re only cheating yourself out of life experiences by continuing to chase the money. Some research concluded around ~10 yrs ago that people’s overall happiness improves as income increases up until the $55k/year mark. Beyond that, income doesn’t matter much. Of course that would be a little higher now with inflation but I guess the OP has cleared that figure.

I think it was around 15 years ago I started researching typical incomes around the world and I noticed that Japan paid SWEs double the US average. Cost of living was about 50% higher in Japan but it still worked out that a US→Japan move would have been a lifestyle upgrade. So there are some rare exceptions.

I think you would benefit most by moving abroad. Staying in one country your whole life is very one-dimensional. If you move to another country, esp. overseas, you will look back on your current boredom as wasting your life and you will regret not having done it sooner. Go for just one year. You can always return if you don’t like it. You might be someone who says “I went for 1 year, but stayed 5”.

But first move to a purple swing state like GA or PA for just a month or two, then move your stuff into mini storage. Two reasons: you get to experience a different part of the US, briefly, and you can register to vote in a place where your future votes will count the most. Because that’s the state you will vote in while abroad. OTOH, isn’t Texas on the edge of being a swing state? It’s probably not a bad place to vote from.