Then perhaps a better phrasing is “may be the only way to feel warm and get to sleep”, even if it doesn’t actually warm you.

I wanted to avoid water propping it because of the tough transition back to soil (and because it would be quite a long cutting, I was worried it might drop leaves). That’s why I wanted to try air layering :)

I see, so a community with asshole leaders would still suffer the same problem in my vision, but they wouldn’t be able to hold other members hostage as in your case since it’s self-hostable - people who do not feel represented or who are not happy with the moderation can start their own community in the same neighbourhood

Thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts and experience!

I can see the problem with getting people to use something different too, my hope is that providing a sufficiently good alternative and making it very local could help - once the platform is mature enough, I would advertise it by physically throwing a letter in the mailbox of every person on my street. That’s when I would find out whether anybody cares or not - getting everyone on at once seems to be the best chance for starting a community from nothing since there would be initial exploratory activity by people who are interested.

I think making it as easy and useful as possible is especially critical here or there will simply be no interest. It has to be better at what it’s doing than established platforms, which is not an easy task.

On the broader topic of positive and negative experiences, as well as toxic behaviour, I share your thoughts and experiences. I think a federated or at minimum self-hosted community has better chances of avoiding the fate of big sites like Nextdoor - I reckon that people who are into self-hosting and community/sharing largely do not hold ultraconservative values. There is the “abuse is free speech” crowd in the fediverse too, but at least anyone could create a different community in the same area.

Effective and transparent moderation tools should be high on the list of priorities though, just as high as other ways to avoid abuse.

Banned by who? How was moderation done on Nextdoor? I am curious if a non-centralized network could do better in terms of building communities that uphold different values. Of course nothing would stop a group of extreme conservatives from coming together and making an instance for being horrible, that’s a more broad problem though in my eyes.

Thanks, will have a look at that :)

I can see that it would be an issue if your neighbours are toxic people, unfortunately technology can’t solve that. Is there something that could have remedied this or do you see this as a matter of luck?

What was your experience with it? Is there something that could have remedied the problems you had? It would be good to learn from things that didn’t work.

Thanks, wasn’t aware of that!

On some level yes, but ultimately the worst cases of poorly invested time make me learn to spend my time better, so it wasn’t entirely wasted - I like to think of it as a learning experience.

What I am more concerned about is subtle time wasting, sprinkled all throughout daily life in the form of various technologies and media mainly. It’s so hard to get a feeling for how much time you are really spending there and it’s even harder to escape it.

So cool and strange looking at the same time, thanks for sharing!

Have to agree, it’s a funny story but charging someone a stupidity rate for nonexistent work isn’t justified by that person being stupid and a pain in your ass. Unless your circumstances force you, you can always just refuse work from customers like this. So many people downvoting this is disappointing.

I always love the “now in the British Museum” line… Interesting how things end up there! 😐

From the article:

The termite “puppet” may help the beetle evade detection—though termites are blind, they sense one another through touch. The beetle may also absorb unique chemicals called cuticular hydrocarbons from the termites or produce similar compounds in order to enhance the perception that it is a termite as well.

There are many good replacements, you just need to stop using Github :)

Some examples: Forgejo/Gitea (self-host or hosted eg. codeberg.de), Gitlab (self-host or hosted), Sourcehut (self-host or hosted eg. sr.ht)

C is old, ubiquitous and still does not have a good replacement for its low-level cross-platform usecases, so I’ll believe it when I see it 😄