Houses are trophies to lord over the plebs at this point.

It's a bit of both, from my understanding. Creamy Creations? HEB makes the stuff. Triple-chocolate granola? Made in Germany.

From your avatar, I think you're OK.

I'd like to be able to be mobile. Part of my current situation is I wasn't able to afford to replace my car a couple years ago because of rent then.

Can confirm the peanut butter cups are just as big as last year.

Friendly reminder that Texas Campfire is also available in the frozen section. (It's back!)

Yeah, this is just one prong of my feasibility study. Financing costs on used look very reasonable compared to my current rent, to say nothing of what I'm about to hear it's going up to.

Luggage brand names get weirder and weirder.

The admins have been very open about the whole thing. It basically revolves around the open signup policy (my other instance requires a short essay and decides on admission because of the tone they want to see) and the fact that a few bad actors were harassing admins, mods and users. The currently available option that addresses this is full defederation; the decision is being sold as temporary until finer controls are available.

From the mods' explanations (ongoing), it sounds like if any aspect of an instance is a problem (communities or users), the only way to block it is full defederation (god I hate typing and seeing that word). They're hoping once the tools are less blunt this can be rolled back, and, frankly, I can understand why they don't want an instance they've put years of effort into losing its tone.

What sort of redundancy are you referring to? I'm still wrapping my head around all this, so I can't imagine what that would look like outside of basically instances that serve as embassies. I'm planning on spinning up an instance myself to play with at some point; that would be accelerated if another schism hits down the road and it becomes necessary to federate for myself.