OP, check out the websites about grants ISPs are getting to put fiber in rural areas and see if your area is on the list somewhere (I would try and link you to some, but I’m on mobile and for some reason I have a hell of a time finding those sites while on mobile). You can see below what I’ve had to deal with for about 20 years, until my area finally got covered by one of those grants a few months ago. I am super rural - like, I am literally surrounded by nationally protected forest and nothing else; it’snot a place I thought would ever be included in those grant locations. It was, though, and I now have Gigabyte internet with no cap, with VOIP, for $74.98 a month. If I’m not using WiFi, I get an actual gig of download speed. If I’m on wifi, it’s usually between 600-900MB.

Up until recently, we paid Centurylink about $150 a month for two lines into the house. Each line maxed out at 0.75MB download speed and 0.23 MB upload speed. We needed two lines to even be able to function. Almost 20 years of this, with no other options besides Hughesnet. We tried them for a little while; their equipment cost a fortune, it was about$150 a month, the speed was nearly as bad and they had a 200MB A MONTH CAP. We had to turn off images for websites in order to not go over the cap. Previous to 2004, I lived in a very rural part of NY. We had high speed internet for $69 a month, no cap. I can’t remember the speed, but I remember that it took 3 minutes to download a full sized movie. 20 YEARS AGO the internet was better, and cheaper!

Just one of those fires is 600 square miles in size. I can’t even begin to comprehend what that must be like, and I’ve been in a wildfire situation before

I did the same! “Why is my crafting crack company making cars now?!”

I think that app choice makes a difference, too. I would guess that most people on mobile picked one or two apps to try, and if their picks weren’t great (or the user was too impatient to wait for improvements) they called the whole experience shitty and bailed. Those of us committed to the move hung on and waited for our apps to get better.

In my case, I grabbed every ios app I could find and tried them all. Some were not so good, some were good and improving at a lightning rate. Living through those growing pains is worth it to me, especially when the improvements are crazy fast. I’m mostly using Memmy now, and I’m really happy with it. I only have one tiny, unimportant issue with it involving text selection, but it’s nothing compared to how good they’ve made this app so quickly. Memmy is a large part of why I stick around.

I got super frustrated with Mastodon because of this. I’ve tried a couple of instances with no luck. And hilariously, I have to think that the furry folks are either having the same problem finding a home, or they are stalking me, because everywhere I move, shortly after, a ton of furries appear and do introductions. Furry stuff is not my thing, but I can appreciate how they might have a hard time finding a good place to settle.

Edit: so either my app is showing comment threads oddly, or he edited his comment, making my reply completely nonsensical. Originally, he said the video was scammy bullshit, and that he knew it for “two simple reasons.” His 1st was that no one living like that would actually jump on a horse from the rear, and the second was that no one ever sleeps over animals because they’d die of methane poisoning. I guess he couldn’t argue my reply so just changed his narrative instead.

End edit.

Where is the Lemmy version of /r/confidentlyincorrect? People have kept livestock on the first floor of their homes for thousands of years; the heat from the animals helped to keep them warm, and it kept the livestock safe from thieves. And no one sleeping above livestock is going to die of cow farts. Bless your heart.

Housebarns have been used the world over for thousands of years

I am not autistic (I don’t think, anyway), but have a host of other issues. I have the same reaction as you to social situations, and the suck of having to cancel things I enjoy because I just can’t do more social at the moment. And the guilt of being unreliable because of it all. It took me a very long time to get up the nerve to do this, but if the above involves people I know well -in my case, usually coworkers - I am just super blunt and up front with them. "I am not feeling great / I’m not up to this, I’m sorry I won’t be joining you / I’m going to head home now ". etc. I’ve done it long enough now that they are used to it, and they can see that when I am up to it, I do whatever it is I need to do. I just got sick of finding excuses when I was pretty sure they all knew it was bullshit anyway. It’s had some positive results for me, too, in that they stopped asking me to do some things because they knew I was probably going to be burned out by then and nope right out of it later.

And everyone but the poor Afghans knew this was how it was going to play out from the start. :(

you don’t need to understand them

Part of the problem is that there are a lotof people who not only don’t understand, they don’t want to, and will actively try to avoid it, even if it’s required for their job. I have a coworker who will actively sabotage her tasks that involve even basic office use because she hates tech. Just yesterday she managed to lock herself permanently out of her apple account and lost EVERYTHING because she refused to do any kind of setup to make sure she knew her passwords or had her shit backed up. Years of stuff gone.

There’s a lot of people out there like that.

My addition to this would be [email protected], for a good list of apps you can try out. Note that while it says apps, this also covers browser extensions and PC web apps.

…also note I have never linked before, so I have no idea how that is going to turn out.