anon6789

This was what I came here to say.

My HOA is thankfully decent, but I know many have but had positive experiences.

When we’re talking Lemmy instances, packing up and moving is one thing, but when we’re talking residence, who’s going to want their local dictator running things?

People like to hate on things like McDonalds or Budweiser and so on, but with that massive oversight and standardization, you gain a consistent product. With laws and their enforcement, it’s nice to have that consistency.

Worry about red/blue states is bad enough, let alone if we’re talking red/blue streets! Some things are better big and boring.

Ethiopian is amazing! So much flavor, plus you get to eat the plate and utensils! 😁

I try to pick something I’ve never had before first my birthday meal every year. The best one was probably the Uzbek place. Everyone there kept trying to talk to me in Uzbek as we appeared to be the only native English speakers in the house, so I’ll assume it was authentic.

All kinds of grilled meats, multiple types of breads, fancy sodas (tarragon was awesome!), sour cherry pierogies with whipped sour cream, stuffed pasta… They had some of everything with their own twist on it. I had plov, the national dish, which was a rice pilaf with grilled meat. Absolutely delicious.

I’d say the hardest cuisines to find here are anything African or anything Eastern European. For that though, the secret is keeping an eye out for church festivals. The Greek Orthodox Church has one that has African and Eastern European, the Polish shrine has a Polish festival, and the Coptic church had Egyptian.

I have the AP Top Stories page as my bookmark. It gets rid of even more of the stuff OP doesn’t want.

Only borderline story is about Taylor Swift and food banks, but the focus is on the economics and other issues food banks face, so I feel it is still within guidelines. There’s no celeb drama or gushing in it.

This and my local NPR affiliate are my primary news sources.

Perfect!

Give that a read, and then if you want to follow it, the wiki will give you the current lowest costs funds for all the major companies so you can do your IRA/401/HSA into the best funds available.

The Bogleheads Guide to Investing was the thing that helped me the most. My family got me prepared for day to day finance, but nobody explained retirement savings to me.

This book broke everything down into easy to understand terms, and made me feel comfortable investing wisely.

The book used to be free online, but I don’t see it anymore. You could search up a PDF, or they have a really good wiki that covers most of it, but more briefly. Here is the Getting Started page.

Was bored one day and decided to watch Bojack Horseman since it had that guy from Arrested Development in it. It was weird, but funny, so I kept watching.

After a while, I started to recognize a lot of myself and things similar to my life, and since I was seeing someone else do this stuff, I knew that it wasn’t healthy or necessarily supposed to be funny if it were a real person.

It helped me to start understanding that all my life, I’ve had horrible depression that lead me to really sabotage myself and almost every relationship I’ve ever had with anyone.

I ended up talking to my doctor, and it turned out to be something that was very easy to fix, and as soon as I got on the proper medicine, I almost immediately started experiencing life in a new way.

It helped me come to better terms with a lot of my childhood, and I no longer felt a crushing weight every day and could deal with day to day events in a healthy way.

I’m still a damaged person who doesn’t quite understand a lot of things I think “normal” people understand, but I’m able to identify it and talk about it instead of it making me angry and frustrated.

I’m in an overall significantly better place now. I understand myself a good bit more, and I’ve come a long way in being a better person. I still carry a lot of emotional weight not that I realize all the bad things I’ve done to so many people, and I frequently feel the loss of those relationships, but it’s more a reminder of how far I’ve come instead of something actively hurting me still after all these years.

I really liked the show, and there’s a lot of fun things in it, but it’s hard for me to watch now, as it reminds me too much of old me. I do really love Paul F Tomkins though and listen to him on Threedom and I just saw him on the Comedy Bang Bang tour.

I never expected a talking horse to turn my life around when nothing else did, but I won’t complain.

Totally agree with you. I feel bad for the young people that didn’t get to experience the Internet before business started to take it seriously. The Fediverse is a nice taste of those days though!

I’m not sure what to make of your “helped me get through feeling much like OP”.

I’ve talked extensively with Blaze and others on the Fedigrow community about pretty much your exact set of bullet points over the past few months and the shine started to wear off Lemmy for a bit. You’re far from alone in feeling how you described in your post, as can be seen in most of the replies here.

I think it’s just taking a step back and being able to appreciate what we do have. We haven’t turned into some complete right/left hellhole, the top posts everyday add up to thousands of comments, we have some quality content providers, and some really fun commenters. I certainly wouldn’t be ashamed to show someone my Lemmy feed.

It’s good that you still have the drive to want to keep improving things around here in the ways you feel comfortable contributing to. Many initial hurdles to getting on Lemmy feel resolved, and so many in apps are equal to the Reddit apps for most use cases. Many initial accounts were probably from people trying to figure things out. I know I had like 5 accounts and only really use 1 now.

I think we’ve just hit a plateau for now. My personal feeling is working on the culture is our best way forward to be different than Reddit and to pick up more people looking to escape the toxicity. The time to set our tolerance levels for certain behaviors is now before we get too big to reign it in. We’re a pretty good group now, and I hope it stays this way or gets a little better like last summer.

I’m glad when I see people speak up like this though. It makes us all reflect on the guys and bad we see here and to think about where we stand ourselves in all of it.

You and the Fedigrow crew helped me get through feeling much like OP a while back. I think that was a really good idea, because it is tough and emotional at times doing what we do. It can be easy to feel alone when you put yourself out there every day and feel like nobody is around or like you’re doing something wrong and people are falling off.

I never set out to be anybody here, but I was done with Reddit, and wanted to keep something that made me smile continue on, so I just sucked it up and did what needed to be done. You guys make it worth it, and as long as the people that do show up are having a good time, I’ll do my part to keep the party going. I get old, pre commercialized web vibes from Lemmy, so I’m gonna stick it out here as long as I can, because this is the kind of thing you don’t just get anywhere anymore.

Appreciate the shout out as always! We have a great set of people here, and we should all be happy with this place we’ve built together, even if it’s still a humble, cozy place. I feel we have organic growth, and it will come in waves as Lemmy builds and improves. Just keep doing what we’re doing and we’ll be good!

I feel it is pretty stable here. I post every day, and it’s been a tad slower lately, much like I believe Blaze said, feels due to people going away for trips. Weekends are a decent bit slower, where usually they have been busy. That’s where I notice it the most. My subs are lower than at the start of the year, but they’re still going up slow but steady. Interactions are still steady, which is my main concern. As you’ve mentioned, people want to see that interaction. I don’t want to say my content is useless, because people don’t need owl pics and animal rescue facts every day, but I typically get 100+ likes per post, and a handful of comments.

The key I feel though, is I have the same people coming in regularly every day, or every other day, and they are also participating. They make the place look alive more than me just throwing things out there. But that is a specific thing I work on, as much as the post content itself. When people come and make comments, I give them my full attention. I talk back to them, I laugh at their jokes and puns, I take time to answer their questions, I pay attention to what content they like or don’t like, how I post links. I treat them like they were clients. And now in return, they see that the community is a fun place to hang, and they come back regularly, even though I’m not giving them anything they couldn’t find, but I am adding value to their days. I make them smile, I make them feel like their effort commenting matters, I make them feel like they motivate me to keep posting (because they do!), and I teach them about things they never expected to care about.

But it’s a lot of hard work! I try not to think about the time I put into this just for fun. Many of us have been here before the API exodus or before and have put in hours posting to nobody or a dozen people until we’ve built up momentum. Most people won’t even upvote, let alone comment or post, so it’s going to come in waves building up this place. You’re still in the wilderness here. We’re still pretty much the first wave of Fediverse settlers. We’re here while it is rough, setting the foundations of what will hopefully come, keeping us from fading to nothing. I don’t think new people appreciate that point. It’s not like 25% of Reddit broke off and came here with all the posters and the audience, we’re starting from scratch. I think what we have is amazing for a bunch of nobodies with no corporate cash. We’re all volunteers, building the social media we want to have. We should be proud of it, no matter what stage it’s at.

Moderation is an area I feel could be stronger. Most threads are pretty good, but some could use a bit more reigning in. Part of the problem I see with that though, is the vocal part of the community is already hating on “heavy handed mods”, and you missed all the trashing of Beehaw for doing what I considered to be appropriate moderation. The Fed is full of a pretty diverse group of people. I talk to people from multiple countries, and the amount of LGBT I’ve gotten to get insight from has been amazing. It’s really helped me grow in my understanding of some things just being around all these people. But we need to ensure everyone is treated equally and respectfully, and there are many that want to bring Reddit behavior over here, and it’s up to the mods and commenters to decide if that’s what we want or not. I don’t want it, but many see no issue. I’m glad when people comment on it, because if people just accept it without speaking up, no one will know.

There is a lot of good here, and even with 50k users, there’s going to be much more mid and crap than gold, but it’s here. Your comments look good, and you seem to stick to things you enjoy and avoid some that drag you down, and it’s important to notice your own behavior if you click stuff that is going to annoy you. I hit delete on a lot of comments when I wade into some of these topics. Some stuff I just don’t want to get involved in, especially as someone that is at least somewhat “known” around here now and is too lazy to make an alt. But I remind myself I’m here to have fun, and if I want news without the potential drama, I’ll leave here and go to AP or whatever. I’d hope posters would make stuff to help you have a good time, but it’s our job to cultivate our own experience ultimately.

I could go on forever talking about this stuff, but I’ll stop for now. Just give it time and explore more, and since you seem to comment, keep doing that. It’s the best thing for this place. Post, comment, give feedback, repeat.

Summit kicks so much butt! I’ve tried about a dozen apps, but this is the only one I use, though Connect was good too.

The dev is great, and I’ve gotten lots of help and same or next day fixes whenever I’ve reported issues.

It’s beautiful, versatile, and powerful, with a great person backing it up.

Agreed. The paper in the basket will neither conduct as much heat away from the fries as a plate and doesn’t seem to trap as much steam.

Haven’t had this in a while, but Sal’s Sassy Sauce (NY chicken chain) is like a mustard based sweet and sour sauce. With the love mustard has been getting on these condiment threads, some of you may be interested.

Here’s the closest recipe I can find to the one I’ve used, though my recipe has yellow mustard instead of Dijon. I feel yellow mustard is most like the original. I don’t think it would get the right color with Dijon.

This recipe is fairly large, but the amounts look like they should 1/4 easily. I made the whole thing and put it in a squeeze ketchup bottle.

Try it on anything you’d like a sweet or honey mustard on.

I’m relatively new to this also, but here’s my take…

I looked at 2 transcriptions I found, listened to the chorus a few times, and tried what you had on my piano vs what the transactions had.

I think it’s better without a slur or glissando. The “hap-py, heal-thy” doesn’t seem to have any legato in the recording, not quite staccato, but the notes sound articulated separately in the B - E - B - E to me.

The transcriptions just have those 4 notes as 1/4 notes, and I feel that is correct.

I bounce back and forth between 2 local places. With a simple food like pizza, the little differences in the ingredients and how they’re prepared come through moreso than in a complicated dish.

The one place has a chewier crust, the other has a breadier crust. One has a sweeter sauce. The place I originally went to when I came here made a more well done crust that I didn’t like, but it’s one of the more popular places in town, so some people definitely prefer it. With local places you’re not stuck with a single flavor or style and you can get what you’re in the mood for that day.

With that said, sometimes Domino’s or Pizza Hut takes me back to childhood memories, which helps out the flavor there. I never had Pappa John’s as a kid, so I didn’t like it much as an adult, but the other 2 remind me of being a kid. They’re probably not arbitrarily better than Pappa John’s, but they get the nostalgia bonus.

You are likely not missing out on anything. The feature set is on the F-droid link, so you can see if there’s anything extra you’d like to try. Moon Reader is probably a bit more polished and pretty to my recollection.

Librera only reads local files, so you need to already have your books. It has a few reading modes, does text to speech to turn regular books into audiobooks, sheet music mode to flip pages for you, and some other fancy stuff I haven’t tried.

I used to use MoonReader, but this is FOSS so I switched over. If you get it from F-droid, you get the pro version and it also has no Google Play services.

If you have a source of book files (PDF, epub, Kindle, cbz, etc) such as Project Gutenberg or another alternative repository of books, you are set. The archive source I use has the things I look for: older fiction, sheet music, programming books.

Librera for books.

Too Good To Go for food.

Bring for grocery list.

DRC, Flowtones, and Mini Piano Lite for screwing around with musical ideas.