Thankfully for things other than books (and maybe also for books), a lot of companies offer two day shipping now. Sometimes there's an order minimum for that but I find that most of the time my purchase exceeds the order minimum anyway.

This is the weirdest fucking thing I've seen on the Internet in a long time.

So, Beehaw meetup at the Grand Canyon at noon on September 1st, 2037 is what I’m hearing.

I sympathize. This kept me on Facebook far longer than I wanted to be. If I wanted concert dates, event invites from friends, etc, I had to use it. I cut that cord eventually, but I get invited to way less stuff than I used to.

The Reddit deprogramming goes deep, for sure. I still find myself deleting comments here after typing them out because there is a 50/50 chance of getting abuse or arguments from someone for basically anything you post on that site.

Honestly, people committed to plans in a way they don’t now. I rarely had last minute cancellations when I was younger. Time might have been cut short or something, but people showed up. Changes of plans happened well in advance. Occasionally, I got stood up, but it was rare.

Now, I’d say probably 20-30% of the time, plans get changed last minute or more rarely, somebody bails.

Otherwise, yeah, having a mobile computer/phone in my pocket is indispensable and I’d never fully give it up.

I really love the transparency here, thank you for the update.

Hey, if you have time I have a second question that's only partially related - how come my comments won't post in other Beehaw communities? I've noticed that when trying to comment on posts in beehaw's lgbtq community and a few others, it just spins forever. Is this a server overload thing, or maybe some kind of safety measure because I'm new and not native to Beehaw?

Ahh, got it. That was my initial understanding, I overcomplicated things - still wrapping my head around federation. Thank you for the in-depth response! That's the kind of thing I've loved about this place in my short time here.

Wait, so if the instance I signed up on is still federated with the blocked ones, I won't be able to interact here, even if I've never bothered using the blocked instances? Or did I misunderstand?

Sounds like y'all are taking the steps needed to protect your community, even if it's a bit inconvenient.

Absolutely not. I dislike how much of my data I gave them over the years that I used Facebook. Don't want to start giving them that data again.

I got so much abuse posting on reddit that I almost entirely stopped posting content, preferring just to comment. It's going to take me a long time to unlearn that hesitation.

Agreed. And, so far, the mood is better here abs comments are much higher quality. I've been using normal forums again for the past few months and I've grown to like smaller communities.

This will be how I use it as well. Reddit usually tends to have the most concise, up-to-date answers for a lot of questions that I have about most my hobbies. Especially video games.

That will hopefully change, but it was such a good way to basically guarantee I found the information I actually wanted.