Same old story of a community-driven site resorting to ads for revenue. After feedback they started a subscription-based version called totalFark that didn’t have ads. Then they introduced ads on totalFark as well, but didn’t vet their advertisers. So some of the banner ads were running malicious code on users browsers.

Love the idea! Kinda like fark.com before they got all shitty.

No worries! If you’re starting out you can’t go wrong with a T1000-E. It’s water resistant, has GPS built-in, and ties everything together in a neat package for ~$35. There are plenty of other nodes out there but it’s more of a build your own kit situation. If you’re into microcontroller programming and stuff like arduino/RP/etc then Heltec v3 Lora boards are good tinker hardware.

We also have a community here on mander for meshtastic.

Yes! If you leave the default channel enabled it will join the public meshtastic network. But you can run eight channels at once, and the others can have different encryption keys.

The default setting is also to forward any received packets to the mesh, even ones it can’t decrypt.

For a good compromise, use Meshtastic. Long-range radio mesh network for texting that phones can use instead of cell networks.

No idea about bike licenses.

High power radios in the hands of people who don’t know what they’re doing can cause a lot of issues. FRS/GMRS radios under 2 Watts in the U.S. don’t need a license. Licensing is a way to make sure people using them know how to do so effectively, and provides for stiffer penalties if someone unlicensed causes issues.

Welch’s Fruit Snacks. The Halloween packs are small and very snacky, only $0.10 each at costco.

The Battle for Wesnoth is my all-time favorite FOSS. Can’t understate it.

One more for Bitwarden. You can even run your own local server and avoid using the cloud.

I joined mander.xyz because it has a central theme around the natural sciences. It could possibly include STEM content as well; there is an ongoing discussion about it. The admin(s) are present and very responsive.

For anyone with a love of science and/or nature I recommend it highly as a home instance of Lemmy.

“Like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass,” the CEO wrote.

This is true. By sheer population most Redditors never left. But I’d say a core percentage responsible for actually making content has moved on and won’t be back.

It’s getting better! All the time! This was just posted yesterday.

Same here as well. I uninstalled rif and replaced its icon with Jerboa. I don’t even notice the difference until the screen loads 😄

My personal take on it is that such behavior comes from the large-site mentality. Smaller subs initially do have higher levels of discourse, but each posting account is still sharing a karma score across the entire site. Eventually it shifts to discussion-ending posts with high upvotes.

I have high hopes that the decentralized nature of things like Lemmy will help preserve quality topic discussion. Lemmy.ml being overloaded pushed me to find a server instance more in line with my individual topics and ending up joining a very nice science community. Shout-out to Mander.xyz