I think you should take a look at miro.com but not sure if they have a free personal account or how bad the subscription would be, since I know you want a one time fee.

Other than that you might try something like affinity designer or their book publishing program.

Yeah but you’re probably able bodied. Self checkouts are a big burden for the elderly or disabled.

Incite a riot, get charged. Makes sense.

You’re not wrong. Then I just feel bad, because I never finish a book since now I’ve trained myself to fall asleep after two pages no matter what time of day it is.

All the studies show literally the opposite. Maybe you’re less productive, but that makes you the outlier.

Assuming this is real, avoid the local pd. Contact your country’s version of the FBI. Tell them you fear for your family’s safety, there have been threats, and that organized crime might be involved. They can use ground penetrating radar to see if there’s potentially any bodies under there before they even dig.

Oh dude, yeah. The documented symptoms of mold exposure are mainly respiratory, but if you were already under a bunch of stress and your body is getting further stressed by toxic air… Could explain it.

It definitely took me a bit to get into, but the scathing indictment of the upper middle class liberal pearl clutching in the face of fascist violence eventually hooked me.

I’ll give “The Plot Against America” a try.

More likely that the lives of vfx workers just continue to get less financially stable while having to have more skillets to cover more disciplines at once while “ai” is suppose to make up the difference according to their corporate overlords.

Anyone that hasn’t read “It can’t happen here” needs to go do so right now. While it was responding to the wave of fascism in America during the 1930’s, it’s remarkably prophetic about what we face now.

Having seen starlink satellites before, I’m pretty sure that’s what you saw.

Makes you wonder about mold or carbon monoxide from basement appliances.

The lack of serious reply to discuss it isn’t encouraging. To be clear, I also find it funny and don’t like 45 at all, but that’s not the point. What made that sub successful was that it was a serious place that was well moderated. Branding is important if you want something taken seriously.

IMO, most likely boils down to a few things:

-Lack of awareness, because the reddit protest was more of a vocal minority than a lot of people realized. For the mainstream crowd, even if people were upset, they didn’t care enough to actively search for an alternative. Even if they did, there were instantly a bunch of small team projects trying to bank on striking gold the way Reddit did when digg failed. This meant that support was splintered across multiple platforms and there was no post that even hit the majority of front pages or r/all that said “okay everyone, we’re all going to lemmy.world” or any other alternative.

-General confusion around the tech\platform and how it works. While it may seem to tech people that it isn’t any worse than any other site, just the concept of “picking a server” is a barrier to entry that makes a mainstream person think “oh I have to do research, maybe I’ll do this later.” I don’t know if this has been fixed yet, but as of a couple weeks ago there was some techy syntax to be able to properly link to content from outside servers properly if you’d viewed it and copied the link via your server.

-Older tech focused people tend to have self selected for caring about technical issues and searching for solutions to the issues they encounter. They tend to want control over their technology, and have it be open source or decentralized. The confusing nature of the fediverse is a lower barrier to entry for them.

-Performance. Performance was fairly poor at the critical moment when the apps got shut off, even if it’s improved now.

-User friendly dedicated apps that didn’t have a barrier to entry, like a warning that it was “early access” and granted devs special access to user data to help develop the app, were not available.

-Content. Because of all the aforementioned, there’s just not the user base and content yet to populate all the communities people want with enough fresh dopamine drip to grab all the mainstream lurkers. If Lemmy continues to grow and attract quality content though, there will eventually be a critical mass, because people usually go to what’s the new hip place after the early adopters have paved the way. Once you start getting a sizeable chunk of teenagers here and they start telling their friends “have you heard of Lemmy? It has less of that lame boomer crap” then you’ll see mass adoption. Alternatively, if the older tech folks end up just posting things that aren’t seen as hip\cool, that moment may not come.

I’d like to suggest that the strictly non-partisan rules of the UFOs subreddit was a good thing that helped keep people focused and avoided tribalist bickering. In that vein, it might be a good idea to remove the reference to 45 in the community header image, and replace it with “Congress” as Congress are the ones leading a current bipartisan push to determine whether they’ve been lied to or not.