I think while the general communities have made it, a lot of niche communities failed to attract enough population to keep on generating more content. As an example, just search for the "Imaginary" series of landscape art communities on the Fediverse (eg. ImaginaryVistas). Many of them don't have any recent posts or 1 post per days or weeks. That's not enough to keep people invested. Even the largest digital art community is still mostly carried by 1 person.

Thank you for this comment, because it brings up some very important issues, which I hope this reply addresses.

The biggest issue is the matter of patient confidentiality. This is of utmost concern in an online medical community, especially one wherein clinical vignettes are presented. I take extreme care to avoid including any information that can narrow down to a patient, thus breaching confidentiality. Similarly, I expect anyone else commenting or posting here to follow this rule, Rule 4, which was created not just for internet etiquette but literally to prevent illegal breaches of confidentiality. With regards to consent - this is not required for publishing de-identified information, or sites like Radiopaedia with their thousands of cases would not exist. With regards to patient confidential information that cannot be shared - this not only includes the obvious ones such as patient age, DOB, dates of events, addresses, etc etc, but also vaguer information. For example, there are cases that I would never present here online because the disease is so incredibly rare that the disease itself becomes a patient identifier. These types of cases I would formally publish in the literature if need be. For this particular case, I do not think the information presented breaks these rules (or I would not have posted). Cocaine use is fairly common among the demographic in question, and being found in the shower is not that uncommon, although dramatic.

Second, to address the following:

The title is like your a friend but the text is from a medical professional.

This is something that I have been struggling with. This community is growing at an exceptional rate, and visitors seem to be overwhelmingly from a non-medical background. There are comments that frankly say they do not understand certain things, and other comments and questions imply a lack of experience with looking at imaging studies. I have been vacillating between using terminology and sentences that laypeople can understand versus maintaining medical terminology. I think this is why you think I am writing about a friend in the title, but the body of the post is more medically-oriented. For this reason, I have changed the title - it did not need to be so dramatic. In the future, I will be more careful with my wording.

Please let me know if this addresses your concerns. I would also love to hear more input regarding point #2. Should I continue to word cases as if talking to other medical professionals or include more basic terminology so that the general public can understand? The purpose of these cases, and this community in general, is to be an educational resource in terms of what Radiology is and does.

Bone break! Why so weak? -> Oh, tumor surprise! -> Tumor growing, bad! Make bone weak(er)! -> Fix fix fix. Luckily not a cancer. -> Good.

Getting caught in a large rainstorm in the evening while on a mountain trail with 3 more hours of rocky descent to go.

I was really surprised to hear this, so I dug a little deeper. It looks like an honest mistake.

Here's what their admin said:

We unintionally did until about 8 hours ago.

Lemmy.ml has a ton of bot crawlers in its nginx logs spam fetching posts, so I added the bots to an nginx block. Turns out one called kbinbot wasn’t actually a crawling bot, but their federation requester.

If we don’t respond quickly, its because we have notification backlogs that are months long at this point.

Just a week and a half ago, we were celebrating going from #2 to #1 most populous instance. And just 2 weeks before that, I had no idea what a lemmy was.

It's like catching a nice surf wave.

Congrats. I love how every time I log on, there's a new update to wefwe-Voyager.

It's probably from the lemmy app wefwef. They recently added the ability to report things and the default option is "Spam or Abuse" while the secondary option is to put in a custom text.

And… we’re back!

How's that Nazi bar story go again?

I was at a shitty crust punk bar once getting an afterwork beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, "No. Get out."

And the dude next to me says, "Hey, I'm not doing anything. I'm a paying customer," and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, "Out. Now," and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed.

Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, "You didn't see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them."

And I was like, "Oh okay," and he continues.

"You have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it's always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don't want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after a while they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.

And then THEY bring friends, and the friends bring friends, and they stop being cool and then you realize, 'Oh shit. This is a nazi bar now.' And it's too late because they're entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down."

And I was like, "Oh damn," and he said, "Yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people."

And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven't forgotten that at all.

-iamragesparkle

Wow that's a new one.

I'll share a personal experience - once I was fiddling around with a patient's IV while he was on the MR scanner table. My head came within ~1 foot of the bore of the scanner at some point, and I could feel my glasses getting pulled off my face. Thankfully I snapped my head back and nothing ever came of it.

Respect the strength of the magnet.

I hope at the least that the Beehaw communities are removed from the List of Communities/All page since anyone from this server subscribing to them won't receive any updates. Meanwhile, they are taking up space and preventing other communities from reaching the higher ranks.