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 @feditips@mstdn.social 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.

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.

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.

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"

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.