Good luck getting the coop finished! I still need to finish the coops and run for our chickens and ducks - they're currently living in our woodshed at night and free-ranging during the day until those are done. Just a heads up in case you aren't aware already - if your guinea(s) is/are male, it might start getting aggressive when it hits around a year old, so try to prepare accordingly. Ours got very mean towards any chickens other than the two Brahmas it had bonded with and was actually harming the others. Not a guarantee that it will happen, but it might be good to have a separate space for the sake of your flock if it does. For now though, enjoy the babies; it never gets old having little peepers scrambling around and being chaos!

My week is going well, all things considered. I'm in the New England area and all the surrounding areas are suffering from flooding, but my town is unscathed at the moment. The ducks are pretty happy with all of the rain, the chickens not so much, and I'm annoyed that the shipping container our friends gave us for a duck coop can't be painted to protect it from the moisture, but I'm overall thankful that the government response has been pretty quick and everyone we know is safe and sound so far.

Congrats on the internet upgrade! I live in a rural area as well, but I (unfortunately) had to cave and get Starlink since the only other option is blazing-fast 5Mbps DSL, which unfortunately won't cut it for my remote work. There's a multiple-municipality fiber co-op getting established at the moment though, and I'm hoping that we'll be connected with them by the end of the year. About the same price, but way faster speeds and way lower latency (and no reliance on Musk), so I'll be switching as soon as I find out it's an option!

Completely agree! Beehaw fills the time left open by my dropping Reddit, but it isn't a replacement for Reddit in my mind. Instead, I see it as it's own thing, primarily centered around socializing, and that's reflected in the fact that I've already posted here in a couple of weeks than I did in my decade or so of using Reddit. It's a lot more interaction and active use instead of passive consumption and lurking, and I really like that. Seeing all the people trying to file bug reports for Lemmy/Jerboa and making demands in Beehaw Support bugs me since (as far as I'm concerned) the admins have already gone above and beyond what I think they're responsible for, and I appreciate every bit of it.

I think you've hit on a good point - you want enough users for there to be engagement, but you also don't want so many users that people feel like they're a face in a sea of people that gets crowded out. What the appropriate number of people is depends on the culture and aim of the site more than being a static number to reach. Beehaw, for example, is trying to focus on creating a sense of community and connection rather than growth at all costs. That means Beehaw's "critical mass" is going to be lower than something like Reddit, where it's more of a free-for-all that seems to be trying to appeal by being a "loud" public square type space. Meanwhile, the tiny forum in the corner of the internet about a niche subject is going to have an even smaller goal because it's safe for users to assume that there won't be as many people and, if they're seeking out a forum for a niche subject, it's also safe to assume there won't be as many lurkers.

I hadn't even considered the quantity of ads on those sites... Any time I accidentally find one, it's a long column of text that starts off with a bunch of filler roughly related to whatever I was searching for, maybe a couple of lines with an answer (right or wrong is a different matter), then breaks down into a bunch of self-contradicting nonsense. I just don't see the ads because of uBlock Origin, so I never see how bad they are. AI generated sites are completely aggravating.

Just letting you know that, even if you weren't looking for it, you're seen and felt. Some of the things you talk about really hit close to home for me - I'm stuck working to support the life I actually want. I bought a house not long ago in the middle of the country, which is exactly what I want now even though I wanted a swanky place in the city when I was younger. No time or energy for the things I love, and not enough money to drop out of my job and just enjoy life with my family and animals. I wish I had a secret to tell, but if I ever figure it out I'll try to remember to pass it on to you. For now, I'm going to keep grinding.

On a tangentially-related note, do you have any of your music available online that you can link to? I love music, just never kept up with learning to play and create it, so I just try to appreciate it wherever I can find it until things change enough that I can settle a bit and pick up making it.

My understanding is that this is the plan - the only reason for defederation is because that is the only tool available at this time, and the admins for Beehaw find it most important to continue pursuing their goal to form a community rather than replacing Reddit or growing for the sake of growth.

This is exactly it. They don't want freedom of speech, they want freedom from the consequences of their speech. They don't like that the people affected by their speech have a voice too, and that the hateful rhetoric they spew into the world is finally being pushed back on. To the privileged, equality feels like oppression.

It's unfortunate, but I think it's because in this specific instance, there is a clear and immediate impact on people's lives. Meanwhile, climate change is a gradual change over a longer period of time and a much larger area. Climate change also requires action beyond stopping visiting a website and actual cooperation among the entire human race. It's short-sighted, but it's also an example of how hard it is to get people to care about things that don't clearly and immediately affect them (see also: people who are militant homophobes until someone close to them comes out).

I think you make a good point with the persistent karma score. Basically, Reddit is a site that has gamified popularity to the point where everyone is trying to make the quick, easy joke or reference as quickly as possible to score the highest number of points. The existence of sites to track the highest karma accounts only served to reinforce that behavior, which wound up having a bunch of knock-on effects like gimmick accounts that jammed themselves anywhere no matter how appropriate (which led to groupies that would try catching collateral karma), bots copying higher-scoring comments to try building a "trusted" account to then flip and sell to advertisers, and likely a bunch of other stuff that I'm not considering. In the end, there was a lot of shouting into the void and not much actual conversation. That's how it felt to me outside of smaller subreddit, at least.

Thank you for solving a mystery I've had since I heard of Lemmy! I kept hearing about a supposed tankie problem, but never saw anything about it. Now I'm even more thankful about choosing Beehaw; I have leftist leanings, but tankies definitely rub me the wrong way.