I dunno, I was up and running in five minutes. You pick an instance, you sign up, you verify the email, and you’re good to go. What server doesn’t matter much, barring it closing unexpectedly and without warning. There’s not enough users to need more than a handful.

Why do these always exist before the internet? We can order bullion online now. It’s almost midnight in a fairly rural area

But yeah, I know a guy that will sell certain things for cash that normally require legal hurdles. But if you show up, cash in hand, he’ll backdate things on his end. One phone call, I could buy out his stock in fifteen minutes because I’m a regular customer he trusts. He’s usually got a few hundred thousand of goods in place.

Barring that, I’m kinda screwed at this time of night.

I know a couple of farmers that would let me buy livestock in cash like this, but that’s only going to be a few thousand bucks.

I know a weed dealer that would be able to give me a few pounds if he’s got it in, but I would have to call and ask how much he has.

Do services count? If so, I’ve got an idea for a cheat lol. Hire my wife for a back rub.

So, I just took a second and sent a text to an acquaintance and explained the scenario. Turns out you can buy a car in an hour or less. It’s just a matter of paperwork to make the sale official. So, if you know a car dealer, and they have enough on their lot, you could easily get rid of most of that million in time. Most of the time wasted isn’t really necessary. If the dealer and the buyer are already on the same page with the price, you could get as many cars as you have time to sign for.

As bat shit crazy as it sounds, I don’t. I let the name “come to me”, or wait for the critter to pick its name.

It isn’t literal woowoo hippy bullshit, but it looks like or when I try to explain it lol.

But it’s a matter of letting the subconscious mind have a chance to percolate with the personality and “nature” of the pet.

But it just kind of pops into my head at some point. Might be the second I meet the animal, might be weeks later. And it never fails me because when I let that happen, the animal immediately recognizes the name as theirs. That’s held true for anything but invertebrates and most fish, even a pissy iguana and an unusually smart oscar.

What sucks is that sometimes the name isn’t very cool lol. For every shaitan and samson, there’s a sugarplum and a cricket.

Element and fluffy. They’re kinda the default, and I don’t use matrix enough to merit hunting around

Crikey! This heah sasquatch is a hairy bugger!

Eh, mostly sms and telegram.

The only people I care about use sms, and I’ve convinced them to use telegram for thighs sms can’t do, like file sharing.

I have and use matrix for specific tasks, and I got suckered into discord for gaming and reddit. But neither get used much nowadays. There’s one discord server I stay vaguely active on because internet friends use it. Post reddit implosion, the matrix isn’t very useful since they were for mod chats and I’m only modding one sub until the end of the month, and that’s mostly solo (no need for chats lol)

Yeah, it’s decent. The aesthetics are iffy, but it works well

Worst, up until the current fiasco, was having told a very deeply personal and unique story, but being torn to shreds because I wrote it pretty. That meant it had to be fake.

It taught me the lesson to never waste effort on reddit.

But the best was kinda the flip side of it. Similar thing, talking about death and dying, which was a large part of professional life, and despite writing it pretty, it resonated with people and I got some really nice conversations commiserating about the way that can change you.

You can, it’ll just be a struggle.

If you stand firm, you can get enough people to recognize that there are viable alternatives, and once you hit a decent number of friends and family, it takes over on its own.

“Hi, I’m sorry, but we charge an extra api fee for reddit employees”

“You have an api for a coffee shop”

“Yeah, its the Asshole Prevention Insurance, since the ceo is a giant, gaping asshole that likes to spew his filth all over things, and we want insurance that nobody from there does the same thing.”

Oh, you just don’t know the right crazy people.

A quote from someone I know irl, “he’s lucky I don’t live there. I would find him and curb stomp his albino hamster looking ass”.

But even the craziest people I know haven’t suggested that kind of thing about employees.

He’s the one that has to worry about a project mayhem castration, not the employees lol.

I wouldn’t fault them as much if they hadn’t dumped the capital into absurdly dumb things to try and become facebook. If they’d invested it into better reliability and reducing costs to operate, I’d have a ton of sympathy.

I dunno, the way they’ve (board members, ceo, admins involved in trying to spin things, etc) been acting, it’s pretty obvious they don’t want the engaged, active users back. They want to turn it into an ad server and user tracking hub like facebook.

Maybe if they can spez, build a new board of directors, and walk back everything they’ve done totally, I might be willing to use it passively but directly (as in reading things there via my app of choice, but not interacting) rather than only indirectly via search results when the only hits are there.

That ain’t gonna happen. If they don’t do that, my last act will be to find replacement mods for the places I’m responsible for, and then I’m gone totally. I’d have done it already, but I’d have to use reddit to recruit anyone at all, and I’m not willing to do that until the protest is over.

Hell, I’ve thought about just doing enough mod actions that admins would have to break their own rules to oust me, and leaving them locked. But I don’t like shitting on communities of people just because the site has gone to shit.

Yup, we’re set up over at https://sopuli.xyz/c/edc

It’s getting some okay activity so far :)

Reddit still pulls things to r/all, even if what’s there is some abandoned sub. It’s why some subs went restricted instead of private, so they can make posts about the protest and the issue behind it that will still be surfaced.

A lot of newer users don’t bother going past r/all, so there’s going to be some activity constantly since not everyone knows what’s going on.

Hell, I made three posts about it all on r/edc, and I’m still getting people asking why they can’t post. I’m not moderating during the two day blackout at all, but I get the notifications.

Which is fine. The protest has never been about getting people to stop using reddit. It’s about the moderators standing up and making the point that it’s the users and mods that made reddit worth anything to begin with. And it was. Reddit side? The admins that handled day to day activity helped a ton when they could, but reddit beyond that was just servers and software. Without content, that’s useless.

How does one use this?

A user migrated one, I migrated another. Neither have had activity worth mentioning.

There’s a handful of others I used heavily that haven’t though. I’m missing r/metalmemes in a bad way lol.

I took r/edc restricted yesterday, though we are/were tiny. While I still plan to find replacement mods from within the community after reddit goes full dipshit, I’m done ring their work for free, with shit tools, next to zero support, and (worse, imo) taking a lot of flak from admins because of bullshit unrelated to moderation.

I dunno if lemmy is going to become the reddit replacement or not, but I’m done with giving reddit anything at all. Overwrote and deleted everything from my author account that had some decent amount of fiction, and my personal account that had a lot of real stories from my life. That ain’t much, but since I’ve seen my stuff being read on YouTube, and reposted by the copy/paste bots, it’s something I guess.

Depends. My laptop has Windows 10 as a backup, but runs current Linux mint w/cinnamon DE

My desk pc is on Windows 7, with a secondary drive I can boot from that’s tuning running mint as well.

The household pc is running debian w/plasma because my wife likes it better than cinnamon. I tried mint on it, and gor whatever reason, it didn’t “like” mint but debian works fine.

There’s also the old PC I used to use as my writing computer. It’s running debian with xfce because it doesn’t get used by anyone else, and it’s slow as hell with plasma or cinnamon. I don’t really use it much, but nobody wanted the damn thing, so I keep it set up for the occasions when I need to be able to lock a door so I’m not interrupted. Which is when I have writer’s block, not the other thing lol.