Well our system is different obviously, but I'm in the Holy Royal Arch, the Mark and the Royal Ark Mariners (an appendant body that's "moored" to each Mark lodge, so most people join both).

And why? Well the Mark fills in some of the gaps for the Fellowcraft and the Roya Arch completes the Master Mason's journey. The RAM? Well for the apron and collar of course 🤣

Since the blackout I've looked at Reddit threads occasionally, but haven't commented or voted on anything. I'm keeping my powder dry until the end of the month to see what happens. If I lose access to third party apps and modding of my favourite subs goes to shit I'm out.

There are lots of things you can do to continue your education, but here's the rub - they're all on you to take an active step. Here are the things I have done since I joined the Craft:

-As you go through the chairs you will find that participating in the degrees gives you a different perspective on the rituals, so joining the officer line is a good idea.

-Not seeing ritual performed in your mother lodge often enough to scratch the itch? You're a Master Mason, so travel. Visit other lodges and see how they do things.

-Have a look around the helpful Facebook groups - some offer educational Zoom calls on a regular basis that cover a wide range of topics and attract an international audience.

-Similarly, sign up to some Masonic podcasts - some are in a 'friends around a campfire' format but others run serious educational series, interview influential brothers and so on.

-Join the 'Correspondence Circles' of some of the official Lodges of Research - as well as publishing and distributing papers to members they often make lectures and talks available on Youtube and elsewhere - Quatuour Coronati makes quite a lot of their material available online, for example.

-Start reading the good "non-fiction" Masonic literature - books that look into our history, examine the deeper meanings of symbols, identify how to apply Masonic principles to your daily life and so on and so on.

When you've done all of those things come back and tell us you're not learning enough about the Craft...

A potentially stupid question so I apologise in advance. Am I right in thinking that this community is sitting on a Lemmy-based server, but it just has an unusual name rather than the typical xxxxx.lemmy/lemmy.xxxxx format?

Well I started off in the Google/Android ecosystem and I just can't get my head around the way Apple devices do some things. There's also cost involved - I buy a new mid-range phone every two or three years that costs me under $300 each time, and then I pair that with a cheap SIM deal (currently $25 a month for unlimited data over 5G). I could hardly do that with Apple given the cost of the device alone...

Ha, no. We meet in one of the Lodge rooms up at the UGLE headquarters building in Covent Garden. That's about 15 minutes walk away from the pier the boat leaves from, which is right in the shadow of Big Ben as it happens...

My mother lodge meets in December just a few days before Christmas, and each year the meeting is followed by a 'white table' dinner and dance (so partners, children, family, friends etc are present) on a ship that makes its way along the Thames in Central London. We go past the Palace of Westminster, under Tower Bridge etc - it's a lovely evening and I look forward to it every year.

You're not the only person I've seen saying that - it might be because all the nice people have stayed away during the blackout leaving the toxic sludge to rise to the top in their absence...

I have no idea unfortunately - we're all feeling our way here at the moment aren't we.

Ok, so I've just joined it. You have to search for it in the 'All' communities tab and subscribe there first. Then you can post. That advice you followed in the thread you linked to is wrong - they missed out a crucial step.

A further PSA - it looks like Reddit are removing mods from some of the popular subs and replacing them with staffers. OK, you might say, but this has serious implications for r/Freemasonry because it implies that they were deadly serious when they said they would remove API access to the apps/mod tools developed by third parties unless devs were willing to pay a king's ransom.

I used to have a 12+ year old account (which I deleted a while ago because I had doxxed myself repeatedly over the years, which was problematic given my day job) and on that account I chatted to the mods infrequently. You know you occasionally see posts from 'very angry conspiracy theorist #1' and 'Illuminati scammer #2'? That's because they've somehow escaped the third party tools that auto-remove and auto-ban 99% of that stuff before we even see it, and it's likely that none of those tools will be available from next month. What that means is that the sub will effectively become an ungovernable space very quickly indeed, because even if they are working on it full-time the mods will be overwhelmed given the very rudimentary moderation tools offered by Reddit themselves. You can imagine how bad that's going to get for the bigger subs when the mods jump/are pushed...

It's beginning to look increasingly like this community is going to be the new home for discussion about the Craft.

I think that civility is still there on subs for very niche interests because a) their size doesn't attract attention/interest from the autobots/shills/trolls etc, and b) the level of knowledge about the subject you need to be able to actively participate can't be faked, and those that try get called out. Unfortunately Reddit has become so popular now that fewer and fewer subs fit the above description - 12 years ago (when I first signed up) it was very different.

Right now Lemmy feels like Reddit did when I first joined - i don't know how long that will last...

Yes it does, but it's a pretty small amount - I subbed to the $10 tier for a month to put together test images for the group and then stopped my subscription, and I'll do the same when I 'create' these characters - I don't need access to that kind of tech all the time.

If you've planned out a campaign I'm sure you could generate all the images that you need for that fee and then un-sub once you're done.

I've created a showcase for my group using Midjourney so that they can see what it's capable of. When we start our new campaign - in the next month or so - I'm going to spin up several variations of each character for our players to pick, based on the descriptions they provide (I'm going to try and post some examples of what I've achieved so far here, lets see what happens).

Frankly they're over the moon about the idea :)

Human wizard Human druid Human barbarian Elf rogue Elf sorcerer Dwarf fighter

I think you're wildly overestimating that timetable - over on that site I'm a member of a sub where you need intimate knowledge of the subject to moderate it effectively (and because of the nature of the subject it gets a lot of trolls to put it mildly). With no community mods that sub would become a cesspit within days, as would subs that are currently the focus of the alt-right, such as science, LGBT subs etc. It's going to be a bin fire if the community mods leave - you'll feel so dirty you'll have to take a shower after every visit to your previously favourite subs...

It's due to run for 48 hours, not 24...

Back again with a public service announcement of sorts. Some enterprising soul is streaming from Twitch with a ticker showing which Reddit subs have gone dark - as of right now it is 8472 of the biggest 8838. I think the company is going to notice that, as are their prospective investors...

It's a bit worse than that actually. I'm now seeing several communities with exactly the same name that originate on different servers - so clearly Lemmy doesn't have a rule about duplication once you cross a server boundary. That's going to get unwieldy quite fast particularly if, I dunno, "Aww" gets popular on two separate servers at the same time - I guess I'll have to subscribe to both...

So I think I've spotted a problem with how Lemmy's federation actually works. I can give you several examples, but I've spotted that there are several 'Technology' communities that originate on different servers. They're definitely different 'communities' because they have quite dissimilar subscriber numbers. That's potentially going to cause a lot of confusion going forward - I really don't want to have to subscribe to two or three of everything...

Something I just noted. I have no clue as to whether this is a feature or a bug but some communities are duplicated across different servers - there are several 'Technology' for example, and I've seen some others - they're clearly not just mirrors or something because the subscriber numbers are wildly different.

As I understand it the Lemmy rules state that you're supposed to check before you create a community, but clearly if you originate it on a different server to the existing one that duplication is allowed. I only mention it because its probably worth keeping an eye out for other 'Freemasonry' communities popping up, so we can let them know that this one already exists...