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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Bikes and retirement aside, I’d recommend knowledge - career skills, but also handiness skills. If you can do simple repairs like replacing a door, changing the flap on a toilet, painting, preventative stuff like changing your air filters, simple electronics (replacing a light switch), etc you’ll save thousands on repairs as a homeowner. Today there’s almost nothing that you can’t find an in depth video tutorial on, but if you really don’t feel comfortable with basic tools most community colleges have cheap classes as do some hardware stores. Volunteering, even just to help friends with their projects, can be an amazing way to learn too.


  • Great advice in the other comments, so I’ll only add this - with this being your first house, if you can afford it, do a multifamily unit or a property that can be used as multifamily. Nearly everywhere is in a housing shortage, so you’ll be able to get a good win win with some renters that can help pay your mortgage faster while they have an affordable place to live. Best if the units can be fully separated so less drama.


  • If you are a major contributor in a niche community, you can publicize your move with info of how to keep following you and syndicate links to your content on your desired platform for a set time then leave. On your desired platform let followers from Xitter know how to follow you (email, rss, bridgy, etc) if they don’t want to join your desired platform.

    If you are mostly a content consumer or have FOMO, use a bridge not an account. DM all the friends you want to keep of where to find you then leave. Bird.makeup is a great Xitter bridge for the fedi.

    In either case, there isn’t a reason to keep am account there.


  • The Light Phone looks pretty neat and I like the idea of a more minimalistic device (especially with e-paper), but it’s pretty unique hardware and a custom Android that needs jailbreaking to update if the company stops supporting it.

    It also looks like the third iteration won’t have an e-paper display, so I’m not sure the beneft of that version will be against a ultra power-saving mode / locked down Android or a mobile Linux on much cheaper hardware.


  • Fairphones due to having pretty long lasting hardware are common early targets for LineageOS and PostmaketOS devs, so yeah definitely a good choice for longevity.

    Google pixels are the best mainstream longevity alternative due to developer adoption in the non-Google Android communities and mobile linux communities. Pixel 1s are still getting updates to latest Lineage Android, though I’m sure it has to be super slow. Graphene only runs on Pixels.

    Librem 5 or the PinePhone would probably be your best bets if you want an out of the box mobile gnu/linux.




  • Yep donate to a lot, but I make sure it’s out of my planned donation budget or out of my (set amount) “feel like it” budget categories. I consider patreoning creators / journalists / FOSS seperate from charity, but I try to pay a fair subscription amount I’d give to paywalled stuff. Political donations I do occasionally as well but that too is not charity.

    CharityNavigator is important to vet charities, and a good starting place to look for charities in causes you care about.

    I try to focus 50/50 on local vs international stuff, which amounts to 10/90% impacts due to wealth discrepancies. I donate typically to organizations doing the work, but also do a smaller amount to UnitedWay (which if you are too tired, stressed, or distracted to do charity research is worth the lost efficiency as they do a lot of charity vetting for you).

    I don’t donate monetarily to strangers on the street, but I do donate (time and money) to shelters and assistance programs who can bring a lot more aid per dollar than I can.

    If you work for a corp, be sure to check if they have a matching program, you can double your impact.

    I highly recommend using a email alias provider as you’ll get a lot of spam. I block most charity calls/text attempts to my phone number if they get it (I don’t understand how that is effective at all, but they all seem to do it).



  • Even if that is an accurate number, there are only ~56 million Americans living in census defined rural areas. With some actual planning we should be able to get missing backbones from our urban areas (which should be getting far more funding). Wireless is also a gamechanger, with microwave, 5g (and nextgen 6g), and Starlink, and that can really reduce this cost since not everyone needs fiber. If we can incorporate requirements for new backbone lines with any greenfield rail or highway projects we can get wireless coverage out faster and cheaper.


  • What would be nest is a feed aggregatior that combos as a lemmy / larger fedi client. When reading your feed, there can be a comments button. The button would do a quick lookup to see if there has been any discussions tracked on your instance for that link and if so let you choose on of the results to join a discussion and a start new thread button that has a workflow for posting the link in a community you select.