No one said the people running it are competent.

Finnish month names are pretty damn descriptive. Before we had Yule Month we had Winter Month as December.

At least in Europe, a lot of people find sparring partners through historical reenactment groups. I encourage you to join reenactments for other reasons too.

They do, and funnily in Finnish, they are called hyttynen while one diminutive is -nen. The question is what the fuck is hytty.

This goes with being mRNA free that some anti-vaccine people tout around. They did their research well enough not to figure out what mRNA is.

I am with you. And maybe a little bit salty about the majority of people. But then again the rise of fascism really has been staring me in the face for a decade. I am an aid worker focusing on refugees. You can imagine the messages I have gotten. Including the most insane, actually copied race purity propaganda leaflet with notes I got through snail mail. In a weird way, you almost have to respect the effort.

Add me to the list with a side of furiously searching for security and privacy of cloud storage services and figuring out which Linux I want to use. I'm shaking my head at how complacent I got with my services. I always do my due diligence when starting to use anything but I somehow forgot to keep up in the past couple of years.

It has been about 20 days for me. But I hardly miss Reddit. While my niches aren't niche enough here yet, I am actually having somewhat meaningful discussions.

Admittedly I just took a huge jump and changed so many platforms, devices and software this month that I might not even notice the intricacies.

Coming from the non-profit world, it is never that easy. Even when there is no one officially making any money, there are people who will see it as a way to make some bank. There is also a drawback in that not making money can and will affect the amount of time people can put in unless there is a fair way to get them compensation. Volunteering also brings a huge amount of interpersonal and inter-organizational drama. That is why grassroots organizations and movements have a habit of fracturing into smaller groups.

At the same time, there is power in goodwill and being non-profit. You just really need to be careful in vetting your instance and keep an eye on issues in a way people not used to this type of world are not familiar with.

But I wouldn't be here if I didn't have a belief that it could be successful enough as a community. I also wouldn't have been working in the NGO world for the past decade if I didn't believe in that. But let's not have too rosy glasses on. Growing slowly will also give this community a chance to work out the kinks and not die in a blaze of fire.

I think the thing you are missing is that you are comparing yourself to people who are not only exceptional but also and more importantly lucky. No one who is 17 is able to do these things without some luck and often resources and support from people with vastly more resources than so-called normal Joe has. You also have no idea how far their ideas will actually carry. You all are just getting started.

We have this image of everyone starting at the same line but even without taking into account different natural abilities, we do not. Someone has neurodivergence or mental health struggles holding them behind. Others have physical disabilities. People come from differing wealth statuses or family composition. Some have huge amounts of connections to what they want to do. Some people get a better education. Some don't even have a home or country they can stay in. The only thing you can do is your best. And learn that your value doesn't come from what you do or have done, but from being first a person and secondly a good person. You are unique.

I am more than twice your age which by some standards makes me old. My life has been full of missed opportunities, mistakes, doing things too late, and a lot of things that other people think are amazing. It is hard to come out of inside my head and really look into what I have done. While I am nothing special or great, when you try to see yourself from the outside the view is very different. What I see as something that held me back and that is still keeping me back, others see it as overcoming a really crappy childhood and functioning despite the hell I went through. What I see as an easy way to make money, childcare, the children I took care of see as something integral to their childhoods in a positive way. And the accidental adventure based on the fact that I couldn't stop myself from at least trying to help made me a humanitarian aid worker with actual expertise. Now I am planning on pivoting again as I want something less stressful so I am looking into university in my mid-thirties. Where I have imposter syndrome, others see expert to be respected. But none of those happened because I was so good. From the social safety net my country provided to the almost entirely free and good quality education I received, lifted me to be more than what my beginnings would have indicated in the majority of countries around the globe. I have friends who only could have 4 years of school until they ended in my country as adults. They got extraordinarily lucky based on the routes and times they took those routes to even end up here. Had they not, I can promise all their efforts for the foreseeable future would have gone to just surviving. While I am somewhat intelligent on paper at least, that was not what made our lives different. It was the where, when, and how our lives started and what happened along the way we had little to do with.

Do I feel like I wasted my life? Yes and no. While I do not regret anything, I think I should have lived a little bit more for my own benefit. But it would be a little bit premature to think I wasted my life. There is hopefully half at least left.

You. You are just starting. While the destination is somewhat relevant to life in general in that you need in my opinion to be working for a goal even if it changes, it is the journey that really matters. Don't get so stuck with the goal of becoming someone that you miss the journey. Your value comes from you being you, so be you. There is really only one of those.

BTW every time I see you commenting on something it makes me think I joined the right instance. Well, I joined after checking that out but you are just making it so easy to be happy about it.

Pissing off entire nation state or at least people in power in that nation is unfortunately easy these days. And while the average person usually doesn't run into these issues the shrinking spaces and criminalization of civil society even in countries you wouldn't think are that far gone are at the level that surprising people might run into these issues. There are also some situations where you don't need to piss off entire governments to get a lot of data from a person. Tech-savvy abusive spouse might be enough.

We are not really disagreeing here. I just think that we need to be open about the vulnerabilities and strengths of software. The security of Signal and Matrix are absolutely great especially compared to things like WhatsApp. But they are not 100% secure. Very little is.