Lol, was waiting for this comment. DeX gang rise up.

(It is OKish)

Gimme an M! Gimme an L! Gimme a T!

What’s that spell?

I shoot birds at the airport.

You, my friend, need an adventure. Any adventure, even if it sounds small and dumb.

I creeped your post history (sorry) - did you end up taking that bus trip you talked about a few months back? If so, what was that like? If not, any reason why you feel you shouldn’t do it now (or soon)?

I’ve felt like you before, at least the way you’re describing it. My solution was mundane adventure - walk a stupid amount to a place you could easily get to by car. Strike up conversations with strangers by leaving your phone alone re: directions/things of interest/etc. unless absolutely necessary. Set yourself some boon to obtain - a beer at Pub X, a meal at place Y, whatever - and make the journey a little less convenient/a little more scenic than you might do by default.

The above isn’t for everyone, obvs, but take the idea of an adventure or ‘quest’ and see if anything strikes you. It can be as grand or mundane as you want it to be.

Just one option among others.

Probably - thought about it harder anyway (see: actually read stuff), and the closest you can probably get to what I was thinking about with your average smartphone is disconnecting and terminating all connections to the antennas.

Let’s be real, though - if I actually intended to use something like this, it’d for sure be something cobbled together using an SBC like the Pi Zero.

Let me preface this by saying that, compared to your average Lemmy user, I am not a technical person. What stuck in my head was removing the radio and comms tech completely - no cell radio, no wifi, no GPS. Literally just make it an average cellphone sized offline tablet, where you’re adding stuff only via the USB port or SD card slot.

Assuming this were possible/actually worth it, would probably need custom firmware to actually make it useable anyway. Just taking an off the shelf smartphone and using a custom launcher would likely be the more practical route, but I’d be more interested if it was offline only from a pure hardware perspective.

But I digress - I just thought it was funny to see this when it seriously was the “What if?” that made it hard for me to get to sleep the other day.

Literally couldn’t fall asleep last night, thinking about how much I’d want this and how hard it’d be to neuter a cellphone to make this.

I’d also appreciate an official update of this at some point (I’d be fine with end of Feb for the first update). What I have right now is some napkin math, as someone who sucks at math:

Ko-Fi: About $401.60 at the time of this post ($160 x 2.51)

Librepay - I made an assumption based on remaining weeks in 2025 last time, but idk if that’s actually how it works, so I’m changing it to a full calendar 52 weeks here (if someone has a source on how librepay comes to the per week figure, let me know, because I do know it takes lump sums and divides it to add to a weekly value): 28.66 x 52 = $1490.32

Assuming this is all 100% accurate, puts current total at $1891.92, about 55% of the proposed 2025 budget.

Please do not take this as gospel - I think I’m in the right ballpark but that Librepay per week thing is throwing me for loop. I think Ko Fi is more straight forward and the $160 is not a per week goal thing

Between both, and keeping in mind the Liberapay donors may be doing recurring contributions rather than a lump sum for the year (so may need to stop if something comes up for them), we’re looking at about $1250 give or take for 2025 so far. Nice!

Edit: Did the Liberapay weekly rate x 47 weeks for remaining year, but forgot to add the Ko Fi amount. Dur.

Edit edit: Please feel free to correct me if I’m reading the Ko Fi stuff wrong.

If you want to see what that looks like in the relevant context here (Canada), check out what lemmy.ca is doing (fedecan.ca). Would be curious if there’s non-Canadian instances taking this approach too.

I assume there’s at least some tax benefits/less of a tax liability to TheDude if doing this, but likely requires an additional level of support from folks too for the adminstrative aspects of that.

https://lemmy.ca/post/25251642

Checked it out, it is truly the sh.it. Definitely a nice lookin’ frontend!

[Edit: played the usual period placement game and this time I lost, it was a working link to something. Fixed.]

Reading some deets:
Liberapay - does not take a cut of payments, the service is funded by donations to its own account. However, there are payment processing fees. The fees vary by payment processor, payment methods, countries, and currencies. In the last year, the average fee percentages have been 3.1% for the payments processed by Stripe and 5.1% for the payments processed by Paypal.

Ko-fi - No fee for one-off donations, 5% platform fee to use premium features/become a Ko-Fi contributor (basically, if TheDude and co give Ko-Fi a 5% cut in exchange for premium Ko-Fi features for TheDude and co). 5% on monthly donations, other stuff at same % that I don’t think is relevant here. Normal payment processor fees apply (usually around 3% + $0.30)

My short verdict: Not a huge difference if doing one bigger donation at a time, go with Liberapay if you intend to do regular scheduled donations and maybe avoid Paypal if you can. Or whatever makes more sense, I’m far from a crowdfunding expert.

Assuming this was regular force equivalent, I can’t truly relate, but as a teen I got injured and RTU’d on CAF BMQ as a reservist, eventually lead to seeking a discharge because in the time I was waiting for the next course, I just wasn’t interested anymore and Burger King was the preferable part-time job.

One thing I will say is, as much as possible, enjoy the small things you can get away with not being in boot (assuming you’re living in purely civvy circumstances). Make your bed? Fuck that! Hospital corners are for orderlies! I don’t know what it was, but straight refusal to make my bed for like a month or two was cathartic as fuck.

Acronyms? Nah fam, say the whole god damned phrase, every time, for everything (obviously I didn’t keep this up, lol).

Mine’s a sillier example, obviously, but taking this perspective might point you in a useful direction, at least a tiny bit. Hang in there.

Killer Klowns from Outer Space. I was in kindergarten and had a very inattentive babysitter.

Boy, that movie will seriously stick with you when your typical fare was Barney related. It’s really the grounding for me having any memories of that period of my life at this point, lol.

I’d support it. If something is worthy of drawing attention to, it’s worth taking a screenshot and sharing that - preferably with a backup to Wayback Machine.

There’s no need to drive traffic to or engagement with X imo, even if it’s relatively minimal.

Same for Meta products really, though idk if Instagram has some defense against screenshots (I know there’s other photo-focused services that do, I’m just not on Instagram very often/recently at all so idk).

Edit: You know, given the existence of xcancel and similar services, I want to walk this back a little. People are in here making good points - screenshots can be doctored, and having access to a trusted mirrored/archived source is better for verification purposes while still accomplishing what I’d like to see. If it’s technically possible to do, some automatic means of doing that would be cool, but even that’s a bit iffy. Maybe something like that Pipedbot thing could work, even if people kinda hate those bots. Best choice is just posting mirrored/archive links from the get go.

Hey, much respect to that.

I just want to take a moment to say your username is amazing.

Damn right!

See, everyone is coming in and talking about different means of measuring instances, the implications for the fediverse and the position of federated services against corporate monoliths like reddit.

But you, verity - you get it.

So!? We’re #5! Or 4! Or something!

(Not everything needs a point - I just felt like posting this. Though it does look like it’s started a discussion about the relative size of lemmy and different instances, which is neat to think about once in a while - or disheartening depending on your perspective)