I think I was trying to find out about a news event that had recently happened in our community (the community groups in Facebook are still a decent resource for local news) and getting the stupid app to show me a chronological timeline of the group was damned near impossible. I mean, I know it’s possible to do it, but it frustrated me to no end that it was turned into a more difficult process than it needed to be.

After that, I said ‘screw this place’. I know that we are all the product on Facebook, but I didn’t mind surrendering to ads and all that stuff until it became a product that stopped being useful to me.

Exactly why I stopped using Facebook because it was damned near impossible to have a chronological timeline on the app.

When that weird ass Wagner rebellion went down a few weeks ago, I followed the #wagner, #Prigozhin, and #russia hashtags and the news was just as up to the minute as anything on Twitter was. After the rebellion fizzled out, I just unfollowed the hashtags. I also happened to find some reliable accounts to follow that were knowledgeable about that part of the world.

I’m not even sure that any of those hashtags showed up in the ‘trending tags’ part of my app, though.

I graduated from high school in 1995. The community I grew up in was incredibly diverse. It was a decent sized city (100k+) and we had about 3,000 students the year I graduated.

That summer, we went to rural Idaho for a family reunion. It was probably the first time in my life that I visited a place that was exclusively white. I’m a white dude myself, but like I said, grew up in a diverse community.

The lack of diversity was a giant culture shock to me. I was in a small community with a population that was about half the size of the school I had just graduated from.

I’m in Southern CA (Zone 10a), too. Still don’t have any ripe tomatoes. Everything is super slow this year.

I can see that.

Years and years ago, I used Mint on an underpowered notebook and it worked well, but Mint kind of got bloated and I wasn’t a huge fan of it at the end.

I played around with a couple of other distros that I can’t remember at the moment on other older PCs. I think I just googled ‘good linux distro for old pcs’ and (whatever) they were did the trick for my kids.

You can do the whole ‘add to home screen’ and it sort of functions like an app in iOS.

Some of the NSFW subs, but more stuff like /altcountry (and similar genre music) and the gardening subs.