NebLem

Only thing not really mentioned in the other comments are Pixelfed and PeerTube. Again you gotta make genuine stuff not ads but if you put at least some effort in the videos and post semi regularly (and ideally use your own instance) you’ll be top in whatever niche you choose to highlight your business with. I can’t say the garden tending would make great business sense (it won’t bring you many new customers) but if the work you do is your passion, its another outlet to share it. Its also not bad to have your own (labeled) ad channel (on your instance), archives can bring nostalgia / meme material, but local only, and don’t boost them.

I don’t think it’d be bad to have your own threadiverse and microblogging platform instances for support and slice of life type stories, but that’s for interacting with existing customers and fans, not for gaining new ones. I’d caution interacting outside of your instance in that space unless pinged / mentioned directly, even more carefully than you would in other socials.

https://marginalia-search.com/ is pretty great for a different approach to search. While not exactly what you were asking for since its free, you can definitely pay via donations if you find it valuable.

IANAL but many localities have provisions that guests become defacto tenants after certain timeframes. This CO lawyer’s blog I found searching for your state’s tenancy laws might be a good read. https://www.colorado-violent-assault-crimes-criminal-lawyer.com/colorado-criminal-law-rights-of-a-house-guest-vs-colorado-trespass-laws

I’m a supporter of a few non-profit local news sources and they’ve been awesome.

I’ve been liking https://legiblenews.com/ but NPR marketplace and morning edition has been amazing for a traditonal source (I love https://text.npr.org/ too, not enough sites offer that amazing of UX) for national/world news. BBC World Service is pretty good too.

Ground News is nice for its blindspot feature but I think I’ll be sending my money elsewhere when renewal hits.

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!

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.

LockPickingLawyer

Steve Wallis (Camping With Steve)

Math Queen

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.

And have presidential immunity.

The Light Phone looks pretty neat and I like the idea of a more minimalistic device (especially with e-paper), but it’s pretty unique hardware and a custom Android that needs jailbreaking to update if the company stops supporting it.

It also looks like the third iteration won’t have an e-paper display, so I’m not sure the beneft of that version will be against a ultra power-saving mode / locked down Android or a mobile Linux on much cheaper hardware.

Fairphones due to having pretty long lasting hardware are common early targets for LineageOS and PostmaketOS devs, so yeah definitely a good choice for longevity.

Google pixels are the best mainstream longevity alternative due to developer adoption in the non-Google Android communities and mobile linux communities. Pixel 1s are still getting updates to latest Lineage Android, though I’m sure it has to be super slow. Graphene only runs on Pixels.

Librem 5 or the PinePhone would probably be your best bets if you want an out of the box mobile gnu/linux.

Yeah you’d probably have to rig something with a usbc to 3.5mm to cassette adapter if you want corded, though someone with better skills than me could slice and solder the two adapters together to make one adapter.

Yep donate to a lot, but I make sure it’s out of my planned donation budget or out of my (set amount) “feel like it” budget categories. I consider patreoning creators / journalists / FOSS seperate from charity, but I try to pay a fair subscription amount I’d give to paywalled stuff. Political donations I do occasionally as well but that too is not charity.

CharityNavigator is important to vet charities, and a good starting place to look for charities in causes you care about.

I try to focus 50/50 on local vs international stuff, which amounts to 10/90% impacts due to wealth discrepancies. I donate typically to organizations doing the work, but also do a smaller amount to UnitedWay (which if you are too tired, stressed, or distracted to do charity research is worth the lost efficiency as they do a lot of charity vetting for you).

I don’t donate monetarily to strangers on the street, but I do donate (time and money) to shelters and assistance programs who can bring a lot more aid per dollar than I can.

If you work for a corp, be sure to check if they have a matching program, you can double your impact.

I highly recommend using a email alias provider as you’ll get a lot of spam. I block most charity calls/text attempts to my phone number if they get it (I don’t understand how that is effective at all, but they all seem to do it).

Not really a album but MyNoise.net has a lot of good generators for background noise. Radio Free Fedi’s Comfy channel also is great for chill study music, and it only plays indie artists that have Fediverse accounts with links to the artist support pages where you can either buy their albums (or songs to build your own piecemeal) https://radiofreefedi.net/.

If it survives a month you can buy another $500 clunker instead of losing the same to a new car loan, though they are far more rare these days (the example clunker typically now costs closer to $2-$4k now, or ~4 months of new car loan payments that you’d be stuck paying for 6 more years). The sweet spot is 10-15 year old cars under 200k miles and using small loans if you can’t pay cash. New cars are for idiots and the financially independent, but newer cars 5-10 years old can be worth the price/stress tradeoffs for some once you can afford one.

You’ll also get far more savings primarily riding a bike (and ebikes make this far easier once you can afford one) since most of your trips are likely under 5 miles, and your old car will last a lot longer for when you really need it. You might even find you can get by without owning a car.

I hope more governments and institutions start self hosting their own AP publishing, at least for microblogging.

I also hope we get more multiparidgm app platforms like friendica and mbin.

Loops and Peertube are super promising, especially with peered hosting to manage bandwidth hits. It’d be smart for major creators to have a delayed archive in self or group hosted instances to help with discoverability and fight risk of content loss. Canadian Civil is paving the way.

I predict there will be more integration with tipping / patreoning platforms.

I predict there will be some ATpro features like federated identity and moderation extended into AP, or a blessed version of ATpro from the W3C’s Social Web group (Bluesky is already working on transferring ownership of the protocol to IETF). Either way apps will simply migrate or find bridges and the wider fediverse will grow.

You can put Lemmy communities in lists so they don’t spam your home feed. https://fedi.tips/how-to-use-the-lists-feature-on-mastodon/