Sorry in advance for the long post, I've tried to trim it down.
I'm trying to understand what is happening to a friend (assuming that what's between us is still a friendship). Background story:
I've known her for a couple of years, but the friendship really only got started about a year and a half ago, it started more as an acquaintance with a colleague. She was always really open - she talked about how she's not super stable psychologically, is in a toxic fwb relationship (her own words, not mine), and a whole bunch of difficulties she was dealing with mentally. Having had a lot of difficulty with my mental health, having been in an abusive situation myself, and having learnt a lot about toxic/relationships in general, I've noticed I listen to people's mental health difficulties very differently, where they open up to me in ways that they don't open up to anyone else. And a lot of what she was dealing with was people being inconsiderate with her. She wanted the same consideration she gave other people - a fair ask, in my opinion.
Eventually, we started developing quite the friendship. I got to know her as a very empathetic, relatively open person with whom you can talk about everything. Qualities I look for, whether it's friendships, relationships or even just the parts of my family I chose to spend time with. Thing is, at some point, she said she thought she was developing feelings for me. That "thought she was" turned into "she was". And honestly, I was never expecting it to go in that direction, but when I started looking at her that way, I could slowly start seeing it. Long story short, this toxic fwb was a major obstacle that fucked it all, literally. We ended up saying things would stay as a friendship, and I'm fine with that (even though I had the impression she wasn't super happy with it, even though it was her suggestion, but that's a longer story). Things have settled in that regard, at least from my view, in the meantime.
In the same time span, I had encouraged her to go to a therapist. I had talked about the mostly positive experiences I've had with therapists, her GP had also recommended she get one, and eventually she called me out of the middle of nowhere saying she was legitimately considering it, and she then did go see one. Thing is, from her descriptions, he seems to be quite the oddball. He's a depth psychologist - not a problem, but some of the things she said about him seemed off. On top of that, after sessions with him, it was like a time bomb had been set off in her, that would detonate about a week later and then she would not be doing well at all. With weekly appointments, that means she was feeling pretty shitty. The psychologist's "answer" was: I do depth psychology, not CBT. Like, I get that psychotherapy can make you feel unwell in the short term, but help in the long term. I sometimes feel pretty shitty after walking out of my psychologist's office, as well. But in her case, it seemed like (and she even said that's pretty much what it's like): here are your sometimes pretty difficult realisations that make you question everything about yourself, what you do with it, figure it out or your own. Maybe I'm off here, to me that seems kind of irresponsible.
Now we're on a trip we planned a year ago, and something really isn't right. Where before it seems like she was a boiling pot of emotions that you could see, now it seems like the contents of that pot have been poured into a pressure cooker. You don't see it boiling anymore, but hear it hiss every once in a while, and I feel like I'm expecting it to explode. I've noticed this in the last few months, but this trip really cemented it. I'm almost kind of afraid of addressing things, this was never an issue before. She barely talks about how she's doing, she always says everything is fine. Sometimes I can manage to get into conversations about deeper topics with her. And in one of them, she said the main goal of her therapy now is autonomy. Which - at first glance, makes sense. She was always pretty worried about other people and what they though of her, and often did things to avoid a bad conscience. But she continued explaining. What that means for her. That, for instance, if there's someone who fell while skiing, she doesn't stop because she's worried about that person, she stops because it's part of the ski hill rules. There were a couple of other examples, but you get the idea.
Honestly, I was shocked. I had a feeling things were going this way, but to this extent? This person who I once knew as an extremely empathetic person has now turned into someone who doesn't care all too much about the people around her. I have no idea where this is going, but a part of me is afraid she's turning into a monster. I know I shouldn't feel bad for this, but I feel like I made a mistake in recommending therapy. Suddenly, a bunch of people she does stuff with aren't friends anymore, but people who are useful for doing things with. I asked if I'm one of these people. She said yes. And then later said she's always available for me if I need something (one of many weirdly contradictory things she's said or done recently).
We had a disagreement the day before yesterday and talked about it yesterday, really talked the whole thing through, about our emotions in the whole thing, why we acted like we did, and were really honest with each other, something that hasn't happened in a while. After that, she seemed a lot more relaxed, we had found a solution for us both. But then, this evening, I have this feeling something's in the air again.
I'm at a loss. Has anyone else ever experienced anything like this?
This may be unpopular to say here, but the fediverse needs to be less toxic for the average user. I'm probably going to be downvoted to hell for this, but here goes: the whole tesseract situation was a clusterfuck and the dev is a jackass, but in one regard he is right - there is a toxicity problem. I mean, let's look at it:
Lemmy's main dev is what many would refer to as a tankie. He regularly spreads misinformation, supporting fascist governments, so long as they claim to be socialist or communist - and don't belong to the west. Anything the West does is, by definition, evil.
Lemmy's flagship instance is lemmy.ml. An instance where many communities have a "be nice" rule, but say anything against the (similarly aligned) group think and you'll be ridiculed, insulted, and banned. Meanwhile, some pretty insane calls for violence stay up. And lemmy.ml isn't even the worst in that corner of the fediverse.
There are many other instances that aren't great, either. Wander into an instance and accidentally say something absolutely factual that someone doesn't like - ban, because some thin skinned mod sees it as derogatory. Remember the whole dragonfucker saga? Yeah, that's very off-putting to your average user.
Look, I'm no stranger to Reddit group think, I've had it turn on me, and trust me, it's no fun. Hell, I've had it on Facebook back when that was still a thing (yeah, I'm dating myself here). But it was nothing on what I've seen on here. I've been able to avoid it here (or, sometimes I've purposefully wandered into it in an attempt to disrupt an echo chamber, but then I knew exactly what I was getting into and expected as much), but what I saw happening to others - holy shit. I mean, to be fair, the instance I'm on is an instance that very rarely defederates, which I like because I like seeing different viewpoints including ones with which I vehemently disagree with (although the viewpoints are very unbalanced, that does have to be said). But it's a hell of a lot more fun to not have to keep your guard up all the time.
So, you might argue, be careful which instance you chose. OK, so I chose an instance like Lemmy.world, which as far as Lemmy goes, is definitely more on the normal side of things. But then, who are they federated with? The next rabbit hole. And how do you know which ones have less crazies? Experience. And as a saying goes, experience is what you needed just before you got it. Then many people suggest putting together blocklist and what not. Another rabbit hole. Put briefly: it involves work, a lot of it. People aren't on Reddit to work (for the most part), they're there to have fun. If you need to put in so much work, at some point it's not fun anymore. And that's what's off-putting for the typical user.
What can be done to make it more palatable for normal users? I honestly don't know. I see it as a chicken and egg problem. We need more "normal" people to drown out the crazies, but then the "normal" people won't come because of the crazies. Maybe Piefed is better in that regard - although I've heard there were/are?tesseract-style problems there, as well - I just haven't had the nerve to go down yet another rabbit hole to figure out what's actually going on. Which brings us back to square one - that's already gone way, way too far for the average user. And I can't exactly blame them. I'm "only" here because I care about open source and decentralisation. And I insist on staying here on matter of principle. But I can't in good faith recommend it to anyone I know IRL.
Anyway, sorry for the long rant. Maybe someone has some better ideas.