Old guy in the USA. My first car was a sport motorcycle so six speed with clutch and shifter. I have a sedan with an auto trans, but also a 4WD truck with manual. When I learned to drive in my teens automatic transmissions were not as nice as they are now, just three speeds and not very smooth. Now they're typically six speed and much nicer. I really dislike a manual trans in heavy traffic, quite a chore.

I do 76F in the summer for AC and 68F in the winter for heating. Try to use minimal heating and air and still maintain a comfortable range. Can get expensive if working the system too hard. If it wasn't a matter of cost I'd leave it on 72F all the time.

Evaporative coolers are great if you live where you can use one, much cheaper to run and they can work pretty good as long as humidity isn't too high. I had one in a house I lived in before along with a regular AC system. It was a good to have and saved a lot on the electric bill. If it was dry enough out the AC unit was not needed.

Haven't used a heat pump before and don't know much about them. If they work as well and cost less to operate that would be a good option, but I wouldn't use one if it's a downgrade in performance. Rather pay for the comfort.

I agree with your philosophy on federation and defederation and support it. It's one of the main reasons lemm.ee is my home instance. I support your actions as you feel appropriate.

That said, it's often the most intolerant people that get overly vocal about issues. In other words they get easily offended and try to make a bigger argument footprint than warranted. I mean if a person doesn't want to see something what's so hard about blocking a community in their personal profile or just ignoring a post and moving on to the next.

Do we really want to set a precedent where we need to block a whole instance because someone might potentially get offended? I prefer not to have an admin or mod make harsh decisions like that. On the other hand there is content that is just not acceptable under the most liberal judgement and that kind of stuff needs to get pruned, that's why we need reasonable mods.

The admin here takes a conservative stance on defederation. He doesn't do it unless there are lemm.ee rules violations or network abuse. I haven't looked at any explodingheads content, but if it does not violate any lemm.ee rules and presents no network abuse it will probably not get defederated.

I agree with lemm.ee's philosophy on defederation and that's one of the reasons this is my home instance. In general you can't call for defederation just because you don't agree with content. If it's blatantly offensive then I suppose that would be valid grounds, but I would hope that reason is used sparingly. I mean discussion that's offensive to you may not be offensive to me.

No issue here on sticking with the standard Lemmy front end. I'm fine with that. Even if you hosted different front ends, I'd probably keep using the standard one. Also hope the best for you on the personal side.

I just finished Season 2, have to say I enjoyed Season 1 more. Despite what Tennant claims the writers are pretty irreverent about traditional Christian views. He's probably correct in saying it doesn't outright promote Satanism, but it certainly takes it lightly. Doesn't bother me in the least, it's supposed to be comedic satire. Though if you subscribe to traditional Christian views and have no sense of humor (which there is a dearth of these days), don't watch that show, it will make you really mad.

BTW, the flaming Bentley at the conclusion of Season 1 was comedy genius.

Some bot content is okay, but I agree it should be moderated. Thanks for your effort on this, no disagreement.

Also, thanks for your contributions to making Lemmy great!

A smart sort would be great. Maybe even some custom settings for it, like weights for community, upvotes, replies, etc.

Aside from any moral or political views, it amuses me when people do criminal acts and fail to realize police can inspect personal data like text messages, email, and social media. I think people smart enough to realize that are smart enough to avoid committing a crime in the first place. Though there are smart criminals that get away with it, you just don't hear about them because they don't get caught. In any case I tend to think being stupid is prerequisite to being a criminal.

Exactly, if we want them in our space why put up with the growing pains of the Fediverse, just go to them and forget Lemmy, Mastodon, etc. We need to be our own space or why exist at all. As said before, if you want their content just go to their sites.

Yeah @sunaurus@lemm.ee is really optimizing the hell out of this instance. A driver for me right now is he's running the release candidate for 0.18.1 and it's a huge improvement for me over 0.18.0. He's also a dev on the project so he's getting fixes in as well.

Sync is coming to Lemmy so it will be like you never left.

Yeah there's a checkbox for it under profile settings. There's a ton of great communities, I've subscribed to around 40. Once you get a good set of communities can just set your default to "Subscribed" in profile settings. That will be your front page. You don't really want to use "Local" because it may not be very active. "All" has a lot of stuff in it you may not want to see. There's a few communities where I don't ever want to see their content. See lemmyverse.net for community info. There's a lot of good communities on kbin as well (you can access those from Lemmy and vice versa).

Also check out lemmyverse.net

Yeah it's different, you'll burn in pretty quick though, just have to get used stuff being spread across a bunch of instances. It feels pretty natural after using it a while. The designers try to make it easy. It's kind of like email where each community has two parts to its name.

I was interested to see what the rush was going to be like when Reddit mobile apps shut down. Looks like it might be pretty significant. Is this bigger than the blackout rush?

On a side note, really liking this 0.18.1 release candidate version, the 0.18.1 official release is going to be brilliant. The new compact view is beautiful and it scales with window width nicely. They just need to drop the post header size a bit and the compact view will be perfect. This release candidate seems to be pretty solid, only seeing fixes, no new bugs.

Yeah the slowdown was a bit rough, been browsing off and on all day today. Thanks for fixing that. Seems to be working a lot better now. That's a bummer you had to increase expenses though.

Back in the day when the only copyright protection was scare tactics. Anyway looks like an ad for a software product, not actually anti-piracy propaganda. Nostalgic none the less. There was a time when all software was obtained through floppies. I sure was glad to see those go, damn things failed more often than they worked. I kept a big box of blank ones and copied everything off three times in case the first two failed.