If you keep forgetting them for another ~15-25 more years they might have value in the retro space.

I don’t have much to say except I love the amount of effort you put into that comment! Thanks for making the fedi awesome!

Granted this law was more clear cut with 14, 16, and 18 being the dividing lines, but it definitely fails to concisely define social media.

The other issue is how do you verify age, and that has been another difficult question if you think people should have reasonable expectations of privacy and aren’t comfortable with the “enter your birthyear” forms.

The main difficulty is defining social media in a way that doesnt restrict other modern communication, education, idea publication, operating a business, shopping, sharing ideas, etc.

Should such laws block Etsy, your family’s Nextcloud, a school ran web forum that only students/parents/faculty can access, Crash Course on YouTube, encrypted communication between your family, etc?

The other difficulty is defining the term “children” consistently. Many US states have simple categories that go all the way to 18, if not later.

Should there be a difference in laws for access for toddlers, elementary ages, and adolescents?

If you think these are easy questions, I suggest you look at the dialog around the UK’s Online Safety Act where they are having to answer these questions after the fact.

No. The internet and the later WWW have been so instrumental in my life there is no way I’d have not had been influenced differently.

I’ve worked through so many arguments and unsafe questions in online spaces that simply wouldn’t have been possible in the very conservative areas I grew up. I’d likely have had to seek answers with out groups and ended up elsewhere adding to my changed influences. I’d have likely had a very different career path too.

I’m faithful that I’d have ended up in the same religion but it’d have taken a much darker journey to get there.

Hopefully things like PineTime, Bangle.js, and the return of Pebble can shake up the market. There’s always neat DIY hacks like the SensorWatch too that can still make the space fun even if the major players get enshittified.

Outside of rate limiting and sending detected bad bots to poisoned static data, yeah not much you can really do without harming valid use cases.

In the federated world people can just set up relays or listener instances, which are far better than hammering hobbyist instances with the additional bandwidth.

LockPickingLawyer

Steve Wallis (Camping With Steve)

Math Queen

Speed bumps are pretty much the worst option for speeding. Lane narrowing, adding curves, and lane diets should be preferred, and you can try them out at similar costs with plastic bollards or even cones. That being said if you want speed bumps, install elevated sidewalks instead.

Most Ukrainians are probably priced out from Apple products. I don’t think iOS is a concern in their use case.

Linux Foundation is also the host for the Servo project.

Hopefully all the drama around this can motivate more creators off ByteDance, Meta, and Alphabet platforms and onto fedi platforms like PeerTube and Loops.

A better critique would be lack of ability or safe routes, since many workarounds are needed to allow kids and those physically less able to get around by two wheels.

The vast majority of adults travel within 10km of their homes for most errands, which is definitely possible to hit with an analog bike. Ebikes can enable making double that distance easy.

That being said, even in actually rural areas where you are biking on a narrow shoulder with 50kph+ traffic next to you 20km each way in 0°C temps, many that don’t have other options still bike, so really it’s a preference for comfort/safety not lack of ability stopping most.

Bikes and retirement aside, I’d recommend knowledge - career skills, but also handiness skills. If you can do simple repairs like replacing a door, changing the flap on a toilet, painting, preventative stuff like changing your air filters, simple electronics (replacing a light switch), etc you’ll save thousands on repairs as a homeowner. Today there’s almost nothing that you can’t find an in depth video tutorial on, but if you really don’t feel comfortable with basic tools most community colleges have cheap classes as do some hardware stores. Volunteering, even just to help friends with their projects, can be an amazing way to learn too.

Great advice in the other comments, so I’ll only add this - with this being your first house, if you can afford it, do a multifamily unit or a property that can be used as multifamily. Nearly everywhere is in a housing shortage, so you’ll be able to get a good win win with some renters that can help pay your mortgage faster while they have an affordable place to live. Best if the units can be fully separated so less drama.

A few problems of chat only:

1. Time differences mean you’ll likely only socialize with a limited group and miss out on cool people and discussions not synchronous to your active times.
2. Ephemeral nature of chat discussions make it hard to keep track of long running efforts where today’s discussions could benefit from knowing the previous discussion points.
3. Chat apps tend to be closed networks, which might make it difficult to reach the people you’d like to interact with.

None of these are show stoppers, and there are benefits to limiting your digital presence.

That all being said: Real friendships tend to require a lot of work and most people can only usually put the work in for a handful. In general, keeping in touch with those you want in that handful is best as follows: real world in-person > 1:1 synchronous video/virtual world/chat > group chat platforms (discord, etc) > letters > emails > blogs > microblogs.

Outside of those few, its good to still get out and do social networking regardless of the technology. For people I want to collaborate, collaboration platforms (Codeberg, etc) and messaging can work great if in-person doesn’t work for whatever reason (typically time & distance). For interesting online acquaintances, filtered blog/microblog feeds seem to get the best time/benefit ratio.

It’s also really good to do event based networking, such as hackathons, board game nights/bars, and community service. Letting people find you has its benefits too, I recommend looking into the IndieWeb on how to best do that if you want to be found.

You really should encourage your contacts to use more secure channels than Twitter dms, especially for illicit behavior.

If you are a major contributor in a niche community, you can publicize your move with info of how to keep following you and syndicate links to your content on your desired platform for a set time then leave. On your desired platform let followers from Xitter know how to follow you (email, rss, bridgy, etc) if they don’t want to join your desired platform.

If you are mostly a content consumer or have FOMO, use a bridge not an account. DM all the friends you want to keep of where to find you then leave. Bird.makeup is a great Xitter bridge for the fedi.

In either case, there isn’t a reason to keep am account there.

Hashtags work on other fedi platforms, many people subscribe to lemmy communities elsewhere.

And have presidential immunity.