this post was submitted on 13 May 2025
74 points (90.2% liked)
Asklemmy
47997 readers
801 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I’m not your target audience (sorry), as I left in 2021, but I left because I had given up on it during the pandemic when people couldn’t muster up enough care for each other to just mask up in public during a deadly pandemic. It was a combination of that and the realization that living in close proximity to my loved ones didn’t ensure I could visit them with any regularity, but that I could socialize with them from afar, so the pandemic gave me an impetus for and removed the main barrier from my emigration.
I was really missing a sense of community in a societal sense that I’ve found in Germany. My social circle is definitely smaller here, as I was pretty firmly rooted in the US, but strangers on the street are kinder (though not necessarily friendlier or nicer) to each other here and they take care of each other better. I live in an area with a specialized clinic for a certain handicap, so that plays a role, but there’s especially a lot of care taken for disabled people and the elderly, who are therefore a lot more present in the community. There are a lot of ways in which Germany is a lot more sink-or-swim than the US, but the most vulnerable people are embraced in a way that I find comforting and refreshing.
When freaking Germany offers a better sense of community than the USA, you really know Americans are cooked. Congrats on the move, I commend your brave spirit and I'm glad you've found your tribe/somewhere you're comfortable in. 👍
Germans are exceptionally friendly in my experience.
source: I'm Italian and I've been to Germany several times for business and pleasure