I spend so much time at my computer that I usually see a problem before anyone else does. Worst case here is emails might bounce overnight but they eventually get delivered.

Well I’m lucky there… my city is my ISP, and I pay for the static IPs. I have completely unlimited access on my connection.

I got tired of all the problems with providers and learned how to run my own mail server twenty years ago. Certainly not an option for most people but I would never go back to relying on someone else for something I can do at home.

My home is tech.lgbt, and you can imagine the type of people there suggested by the name (which is exactly what I hoped for when I joined). I had to bounce around a little on lemmy before I found this home though, guess I can’t get it right the first time every time. 😁

Longmont Colorado, US. There was a time not long ago when we had the second fastest residential internet in the world, and we really inspired a lot of other places to get moving on their own similar services. What’s really crazy is that we spent a decade fighting the State (aka the politicians who were getting kickbacks to block this). We actually paid to get the trunk line here in the late 90’s but were blocked from using it.

We finally got the laws changed so we could move forward and the cable company convinced a majority of voters “don’t you know how expensive it will be to get a trunk line run to your city? You really don’t want to have to pay for THAT!” Yes, the same trunk line we already had available for the previous decade. You can bet everyone got to buzzing about how voters were directly lied to, but it took another two years before we could put it up for a vote again.

And just to show how desperate Comcast (our local cable company) was to make our project a failure that they could promote, they literally had reps standing in our local Walmart, telling everyone how terrible an idea this was going to be, it couldn’t possibly be more reliable than their service, and people should sign up for a three-year contract with Comcast to make sure they would miss out on the initial sign-up bonus rates for our fiber service. For comparison, after the city finished running the fiber to everyone’s homes there was a huge storm that took out services in a bunch of neighborhoods. The reddit discussion was talking about how people with our city fiber were back online in a few hours. Cable and DSL customers were waiting over two WEEKS for repairs.

Yes, I do like to brag about how great our service is, and how badly Comcast sucks.

A bit of a brag, but my city provides gigabit fiber internet service for around $50/month. Due to cable-sponsored state laws, they are not able to provide service outside of the city limits despite many areas not serviced at all by cable or dsl. We had actually voted to use city tax money to start expanding fiber service into those areas and were shut down, resulting in quite a lot of upset rural residents.

Especially these days when so many of them are all based on C. I started off back in the day with basic because pretty much every computer came with that, but now you have various programming languages, scripting languages, things to write web pages, things to build little tiny computers… it’s crazy.

I write code in a bunch of different languages without breaking a sweat, but the human spoken language has always been a mystery to me. I can barely handle one language, I’ve tried learning two others and failed miserably except for a very small handful of words.

I’m lucky in that my job doesn’t require me to produce known results on any particular schedule. That gives me the fantastic freedom to work on these kind of problems during the evenings until I feel I can walk away from it, and then turn around and work on personal stuff during business hours. There are some short tasks I occasionally have to focus on right away, but that’s like a 1 or 2 day task, then I’m back into the relaxed schedule again.

Unfortunately, like OP, I too get deep into an interesting problem and then I can’t turn it off. “Oh I’ll just add this quick line of code” and two hours later it’s time for bed. What I HAVE managed to accomplish over many years is finding a stopping place where I can let it all go, and then drop it until I get back in the office again. I have to do that with personal projects or research too because I’m always working on something new that captures my attention and it really tends to put a halt on casual conversation. “That’s cool about last night’s game, but have you heard about this theory of a hydrogen haze obscuring the view of the early universe for the first few hundred million years? Well, I don’t know shit about sports, so now you guys know how I feel.” 😀

I mean, a community is made up of its members, so it still seems to fit?

Actually maybe this is a more appropriate question for here… When I open this post it says it has 6 comments on it (this one will make #7), but the only comments I see here are yours and mine. What am I missing to be able to see the rest of the comments?

Ah gotcha, thanks for the link!

Keep in mind these communities can be viewed from ANY lemmy instance, you just have to connect to them (usualy just by searching in the community search bar). I just chose my instance based on the general type of communities present here. I was going to jump on beehaw (and in fact did create an account there) but felt that Mander was a better fit for like-minded people to myself.

Ah ok, I saw the comments about the first line title but wasn’t sure what was meant there, this makes more sense. But yeah it sounds like, at least for now, it’s best to use the appropriate web interface for each instance rather than trying to clump everything together. We might actually get there some day though!

So now… HOW did you do it? And is there a way to join lemmy communities from your mastodon account, or are the different types of accounts still fairly separated?

Something that bugs me on the desktop… When I’m scrolling down a long post like this, if someone puts up a new top-level reply the page jumps back to the top to show that reply and I lose where I was reading at. I could turn off page notifications, but then I won’t get the live feeds on the front page.

Take a look at https://join-lemmy.org/instances for the full list and brief descriptions. I’ve ended up making accounts on three different instances (also started out on lemmy.ml because that’s what all the reddit posts were pointing at), but I think I’m going to like this one (mander.xyz) because it has a lot of science-related communities.