11 years. I commented a lot and had a decent trickle of reasonably successful posts over that time.

I got banned just before all this happened because I made an anti-tankie post in an unrelated sub, then gamingcirclejerk auto-banned me with the message "beep boop gamer detected!", whereupon I replied, "What the fuck? Do you have literally any explanation for this?" and then I was banned for "harrassment".

Just basically a sitewide policy being abused by authoritarian assholes. They abuse their mod powers to harrass users they don't like to provoke a reaction, and the second you say a naughty word they go running to the admins to kick you off the site completely.

I then didn't make another account until I needed to to ask for support on one of the niche communities. I noticed in that time that my mental health improved enormously. This place is a lot nicer and I hope it can catch enough refugees to get critical mass and displace reddit. I'm sure it'll change as it grows but I'm really excited to see how different the culture will be as that happens.

Thanks, I am aware that's an option, the only problem with it is if you go looking for magazines on other instances, you can't both browse all magazines and also easily subscribe to them as you go. Using the search tool you get links tailored to your home instance.

Ah. Thank you. I will go and hide in shame now.

The only thing I have to say in my defence is that it's not super obvious that that's there, and at least now the information is available to anyone that comes looking.

It seems to me though that it should just search both by default and not leave kbin as hidden by default. when I searched for instances the fact that no kbin servers came up is what told me maybe they weren't supported.