For the time being the bot account flag is voluntary anyway, so there’s nothing stopping a repost bot from not indicating they are one.

Block and move on is the most straightforward solution at the moment.

I do not as this is not my expertise. In general though, reaching out to specialty academic/medical units are usually a great first step for pursuing something particularly esoteric.

Unless you have a super compelling reason to get sequenced, do not use direct to consumer sequencing services or offerings. In general it’s not so much the tech or whatnot that is bad, but rather without being in a position to determine if you have some genetic, prospective genetic screening isn’t ideal.

If you feel you have a good reason to be sequenced (eg family history of a kind of cancer, particularly breast and colon), seek out a genetics consult with a genetic counsellor or geneticist at a major hospital or academic center.

This comment isn’t to constitute any kind of medical advice. Rather, you are much better served getting sequenced done well.

Discord is by far the worst place for a community to retreat to because it’s resources and discussions are impossible to find through cursory searching and I’m so sick of adding to my list of Discord servers just to get information that belongs on a Pastebin or Github readme.

In many ways though, Lemmy has grown into something that is active much faster than so many other kinds of social media platforms. Does anyone remember Disapora or Google+ being the next Facebook or Facebook replacement? What about Wit social? Most definitely do not.

From my PoV:

1. The activity around memes, image sharing, memes, shitposting, memes, memes, and memes have not felt too different from Reddit, but unsurprising as it’s very easy to consume content
2. The typical communities that have coalesced in a grassroots fashion are thriving well as long as one can accept there’s a lot of duplicate threads (like the Twitter related stuff in technology communities). Some communities are populated by Reddit content porting bots and these feel so barren because it’s a wall of submissions with a small number of comments each and the bot owners have no visible intent to stop.
3. Niche communities are incredibly quiet. That’s understandable but also unfortunate, more so if it is a niche community that did not move over.

Things will hopefully get better with time.

The generic stuff that has a broad common denominator will easily take hold on Lemmy as they would in any growing community (like shitposts, question threads, gaming, technology, news, image focused communities and so on).

The niche stuff will take a while to grow, more so as the niche subs are those less likely to move from Reddit (or already have communities like Discord that they retreat to). More specific communities will need to build a new base here unfortunately.

Time will tell; it’s not been that long.

In many cases it’s a numbers game. Not a bad idea to connect with old colleagues or acquaintances, or to network with current or recent ones.

The unfortunate reality is the job market is kind of awful right now, insofar as the experience is for someone looking, so you run better odds leveraging who you know.

Specialized job boards are particularly great places to target (for example, postings at large public or private institutions nearby instead of generic job boards).

Wikipedia has done well for itself using donation runs and grassroots support, so if there are ways for instances to do similar the decentralized nature of this will work out ok.

Elsewhere the issue is many of these large services have grown to the size of effectively being a public good, but good luck maintaining a public good in a profit generating way as a private company seeking the next quarter’s growth.