I really appreciate the clean UX. When Signal used to let you manage your SMS in the app too, I used it for everything. Myspace and later Facebook popularized the vomit on a page design style but it never resonated with me. I want it clean with clear conventions and no ads or spam.

Agreed. I can ignore my SMS for a day or two, but when Signal rings, I know it’s someone I actually want to talk to.

If your WhatsApp loving friends need some convincing is switch to Signal I would tell them:

• Signal is more private than WhatsApp.
• Signal has a “stories” feature similar to Instagram or Snapchat… I think, I don’t use that sort of thing. They added it in the last few years and I’ve been wanting to try it but like you my friend group is mostly elsewhere apart from a growing few who have had enough of Meta’s BS. The Europeans and South Americans I know are extra embedded in WhatsApp because SMS stopped being used there much earlier than in the US.
• Nearly no spam! I can’t recall having ever received spam on Signal. WhatsApp is full of it.
• Signal is a simpler app. If you have anyone older, anyone handicapped, anyone with a traumatic brain injury, etc. in your friend group, Signal is much more sensical and easy to use. WhatsApp is cluttered and has some baked in AI slop.
• Built in scheduled sends. You can press and hold the send button and choose when your message will go out. This is great for a night owl like me who doesn’t get around to answering until everyone is asleep and also doesn’t want to wake anyone up.

Hope this helps, and let us know how it goes,many of us are trying to do the same thing. How big is your group? Can we help you make a slideshow presentation? :D

I’ve only ever had to block spammers on any Lemmy-like platform. Users tend to be cool and I try to give people grace for being awkward and weird because… I’m awkward and weird.

I need to sit down and have a serious thought about redundancy and what I want to keep long term. I want to leave little portable drives with an encrypted backup of my family photos with all my relatives so I can restore them in the case of a catastrophic failure that includes all local backups (like a huge fire, an earthquake, war, famine, see etc.). Essentially like sending duplicate or triplicate physical photos to relatives in the old days so they can send a copy back if needed. This is addition to a normal backup. Essentially in case the US falls apart.

Like you, I’ve also been collecting other media of interest to me. I would have plenty of space for Atari games, but I can’t imagine spending the drive space to archive every game in my Steam and GoG libraries or every GameCube game. If you have a generous 60 TB of space, that becomes 30TB really quick with redundancy. With a single offsite backup, that becomes 20TB and with 2 backups and redundancy that’s only 15TB or usable space. Granted I’m not factoring in compression, but at today’s prices buying 3 extra gigs for every usable gig practically requires a mortgage. If we could have $14-15/TB again I would probably buy another 2-6 drives right off the bat just to complete my build and be somewhat future proofed.

I’m also concerned about things that need updated. I need working images and copies of my systems and programs that I can restore to if the internet goes down or gets locked away.

Almost certainly some of them. I enjoyed hearing that insults and trash talk are still the norm for corporate passwords you have to remember! :D

At a job I hated, they made us change passwords often. It was quite irritating. I also think it was counterproductive because something like fuckcorporate!666 is likely more susceptible to a dictionary attack than a carefully chosen password rotated less frequently.

Get your tentacles off me or I’ll weld them together! :D

I heard of a similar situation. The person was being garnished but the rate of repayment was pretty slow because they were broke, not coincidentally. When you’re broke, you can’t pay your insurance but in most of the US and many other countries, you need a car to participate in daily life. It sounds perversely circular to me and it’s not getting the innocent party refunded in any reasonable amount of time either. Maybe drivers should have to be bonded like electricians or plumbers.

I live in the US where it is just a greeting, but grew up in a different culture where it is almost always taken literally and isn’t something you ask a stranger. I tend to answer honestly because I want to normalize not being fake polite and I almost always have some bullshit to call out. If you can find something to complain about that other people also hate, it’s a great way to bond around how shitty the world can be. :D

I knew someone who did this kind of work. They don’t wait until the weather improves. They climb poles in 70mph winds with sideways blowing hail and lightning if that’s what needs to happen. That’s crazy hardcore!

I remember watching a documentary about someone who was welding under the ocean, and simultaneously inside of a empty undersea pipeline that they had to swim a ways down to reach the problem area. That’s too damn extreme for me. I would sign up to be a doordash driver who only delivers to the worst Karens before I put on a single flipper. :D. Crazy hardcore.