I also didn't use Twitter but wanted to try to get into mastodon. One thing to note is that the official mastodon app currently doesn't allow you to follow hashtags, only people. The FEDILABS app allows you to follow topics by hashtags. Since I'm new I didnt have any people I knew of to follow off the bat, so it was nice to be able to follow #scuba and automagically see a bunch of stuff I care about pop up in my home feed.

The account @[email protected] is full of gems like that.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

For years, I was hoping to be the very last American to catch COVID. I'd dodged a couple near misses, including being...close 😏... to my wife the night before she tested positive.

When it finally got me it was quite mild. I tested + when I had very mild symptoms, so I went for a run before things got bad. Felt crappy the next day, but the day after that I felt good enough to get another run in.

Not sure if it's related, but every time I got a vaccine/booster I thought for sure that the next one would kill me.

Are you playing steam games that have Linux versions? Or is the "comparability mode" stable and fast enough that you don't really have to think about it?

Like those damn dirty neutrals, I don't feel strongly one way or another. But I really love that if you hate the way our instance goes on this you're free to just move to another instance that shares your views. And you'll be doubly free when they get account migration up and running.

Long live Vlemmy, and may there always be a bounty of other options.

Yes and no. The way I've seen it described is "Freedom of speech, freedom to filter".

We come from a place where all of the rules about what can be said on Facebook come from zuck (and a hidden team of moderators, accountable to no one). The final say about what can be posted to reddit comes from /u/spez, and worst of all, all the rules about what can be said on Twitter come from Musk.

Here, yes. In theory, @Pyarra technically CAN defederate entire communities on a whim. His/her ball, his/her rules. But the neat part is you get to PICK your Zuckerberg here. If @Pyarra is too tyrannical, you can just go be a member of lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, knin.social, etc. and join all the same communities and talk with all the same people.

In practice, any time the issue of defederating an instance came up, /u/Pyarra was SUPER transparent about what they were considering and why, and we all talked it out. They don't HAVE to do that, but they have. It' find this to be a very good instance.

Footnote: beehaw.org is a large instance that has kindness and hard moderation built into its DNA. Right after the first wave of refugees arrived, they defederated major instances because the small mod team couldn't keep up with trolls. People who took issue with this left, and people who liked it stayed. In my opinion, this is an example of the system working. Beehaw's not for everybody, but I'm glad it's there.

That's really cool. Are they photos from a camera's sd card? Or do you pop them over from your phone?

Ama's we're the content that got me hooked on Reddit. I think it was a lengthy Dan Harmon ama and I read it for hours. I think it's pretty telling that I haven't read through an ama in years.

HAD to make a cheese fortress?
Or GOT to make a cheese fortress?

It's a a send-up of the supposedly "feel-good" stories about people that go above and beyond to make the horrors of some societal problem (usually capitalism) less horrifying for somebody. Like, when a child holds a 48 hr lemonade sale marathon to erase the lunch debt of his/her peers. Yeah, it's a nice thing to do, but it should NOT be necessary.

The idea is that we would see stories talking about how great this person is for slowing down an orphan crushing machine, without questioning the need for an orphan crushing machine in the first place.

Sweet. Excellent! I knew there was a reason I didn't pay income taxes this year!

Not yet.

For kbin I use what I've recently learned is called a "progressive web app" on Android. I tried to save a bookmark and put a shortcut to that bookmark on my phone's home screen. Now when I tap that, it launches kbin in a sleek looking browser but without any of the browser parts showing. You can even long-press on the app shortcut to launch straight into different sections of the website (eg. Microblogs, magazines, or people)

Finding answers about Lemmy is an easy, 3 step process:

1. Enter search query, followed by Lemmy
2. Exasperated sigh, because apparently I haven't learned my lesson
3. Enter search query followed by "Lemmy -motorhead"

How are the trails/parks near you? In my town, there's a paved path that runs along the top of the levee, and follows the river. It's smoo th and straight enough that I can lock the front wheel of the running stroller, and get a good run in. Or I can strap my son into a bike trailer. A short drive away there's a rails-to-trails that I can use for longer workouts. It's not ideal, but at least it's something.

Mostly though my wife and I are fortunate enough to work the same schedule and have a lot of family around to help out. Usually my wife watches him while I'm running after work, or I'll come home and watch him while she goes to a class. If we're both working out on the same day, we'll just leave him with one of our parents.

I mean, PR's are definitely behind me, but I can still get out for an occasional half marathon.

Nice.

Where is this?

I landed at vlemmy.net. I tried to register at a few bigger ones that gave infinite circles. By the time I got to vlemmy I wasn't really being too picky anymore, I was just trying to figure out if the problem was me or overloading.

A nice side effect of landing there is that some of my very few subscriptions are on beehaw, and we haven't been defederated.

I think you're justified to be wary of the buzzwordiness of Blockchain though. For the 2 days I spent learning about what all this is before I signed up, every time I heard "de-centralized" I kept asking myself, "How sure am I that this isn't some weirdly elaborate crypto scam?"

Bonus fear: I was also concerned for a while that this was just going to be a refuge for hate groups who have been kicked off of major platforms. I've been pleasantly surprised so far.

I think C-Smash VRS is just about entirely one-handed. Last I saw there was a free demo so he can even try it to be sure.