I was told that most people don't make much more due to progressive taxes

There are A LOT of disadvantages in the U.S in comparison to Sweden, but salary is not one of them. I'm a DevOps/Site Reliability Engineer, currently working full time for a midwest manufacturing company. I found the job thanks to networking, knowing a couple of people who was working for a startup that was acuired by the company I currently work for. Market is difficult right now, but it is still possible to find a well paying job. I have a bachelor degree in Sociology, so it is totally unrelated to my current job.

A good place to stay? I was renting a 2bd apt in Stockholm for 22000 SEK while making only 60k before taxes, after tax it was something like 38k. Yeah, sure, my kids daycare was subsidized and I didn't have to worry about my health insurance, but what I was left with after taxes and rent was barely enough for us. Tbh I even was behind 1500 SEK copay on daycare a couple of times because of how little money I had. We had to eat mostly ätsnart items from ICA, I couldn't afford to buy a bicycle, so I had to borrow one from a neighbor and fix it up, just to save some money on commuting because of expensive fares. The bicycle got stolen eventually. After one year our landlord booted us even though I asked them in advance to renew the contract, a friend of mine told me that this is because I would be eligible for första hand rent contract after living there for 2 years, so landlords never renew 2nd hand rent contracts. We couldn't find another place to live afterwards and had to rent an Airbnb for a while. I moved to Cleveland OH afterwards. I make 2 times more now while paying only 1,600$ for a 3bd house. Our landlord is begging us to renew the contract. We can afford a car. We live normal life now.

200% increase once I moved to the U. S from Sweden. I'm so happy to finally leave Europe

Probably a big data oriented NoSQL database like ScyllaDB. It provides eventual consistency with fast and efficient reads and writes, but high availability, which seems like a perfect fit for the case. CockroachDB favors consistency in place of availability which doesn't seem to be really a priority for Lemmy instances. You would rather have some upvotes, posts and comments missing sometimes than not being able to load the rest of the data.

I'd probably go with a different database engine. Postgres is not scaling really well and poorly suitable to throughput intensive applications like tracking activities, upvotes etc.

I don't get the joke

There are no reasons to learn it apart from getting familiar with some of the concepts in it or working on a rust project.