Another commenter shared a link with a guide to create a custom feed, and I definitely see how that can be better. As a new user, I was having too much trouble finding an easy way to create my own custom feed, and wasn’t happy with any of the existing feeds that I looked at… they all seemed to include more “junk” than the equivalent hashtags on Mastodon. I agree that simply following hashtags has downsides, but the logic as to why a specific post shows up in my feed is much more obvious in that case, allowing me to more easily troubleshoot and adjust my follow/block settings.

Thanks! I was looking for a way to build my own feed, but this is the first guide I’ve seen that seems relatively simple to follow. I agree that there’s downsides to simply following hashtags, but I’m familiar with ways to curate my feed based on hashtags, and just wanted to start with something familiar. The curated feeds are probably great for a lot of people, but just really frustrated me, as the feeds I happened to browse seemed to somehow include more “junk” than what I’ve encountered with the equivalent hashtags on Mastodon.

Yeah, I saw those and appreciate the idea, but I didn’t like them, at least not yet. I just want to follow a few cat related tags, maybe some FOSS stuff, and some tags relevant to my local area. I just clicked through a few feeds related to each of those, but didn’t like any of the ones that came up. Each feed contains posts that seem totally irrelevant and I don’t understand why they’re included or how to tweak my feed to remove them.

I’m probably an idiot, but my experience was exactly the opposite. I don’t really feel like following specific users (at least for now), I just want to follow hashtags. Super easy to do on Mastodon, but I couldn’t figure it out on Bluesky.

I never used Twitter, and am not particularly excited about the general format, so I’m probably not the target user, but I check Mastodon occasionally, and gave up on Bluesky after like 2 days.

I actually found myself tempted to say exactly that earlier today. Someone said something about sucking, and my initial instinct was, “That’s what she said!”, but then I thought about the audience and felt like the gender neutral “they” might be more appropriate, but I wasn’t really sure, so instead I said nothing.

As an American living in a region with halfway decent (by American standards) public transit, I feel like I hear more comments aligned with the European side than the American side. If public transit has literally any downsides, that’s justification enough to drive for so many people.

It’s funny how much people differ. I live in a city and feel much more comfortable having my curtains wide open than when I lived in suburbia.

One of the things that sold me on my current place was the abundant south and west facing windows, meaning lots of natural light (northern hemisphere), especially in the evenings. It drives me absolutely nuts when I visit people who live in dark caves. I did finally get some heavier curtains for my bedroom since summer days can be pretty long and the limited darkness was impacting my sleep. I get wanting to avoid direct sunlight, and that you might want heavy curtains available some times, but I literally get depressed without lots of natural light and the whole day/night cycle.

Some classes translate to an online format much easier than others. How do you effectively translate an upper level chemistry lab to be done online? Even if you could do it in such a way that the student gains the theoretical knowledge, it wouldn’t give them the hands on practice that they’ll need for real lab work.

There’s definitely a lot of variables in that decision, so it’s not a “one size fits all” recommendation. A timed release feeder can be helpful if your cat is constantly pestering you for food, but having your cat associate you with food can also be beneficial to your relationship and can be a tool to address some behavioral challenges. If your cat is only pestering you near meal times, adjusting your routines might also work. For example, if your cats are harassing you to wake up in the morning to feed them, then adjusting your routine so that feeding them is no longer the first thing you do will likely help to reduce or eliminate the unwanted behavior since they won’t associate you getting up with them getting food.

Another potential issue is that wet food doesn’t really work with most timed release feeders, and I don’t think there’s any microchip-based timed feeders that are compatible with wet food. Wet food is much better for cats than kibble, so even if you use a timed feeder for kibble, they should also still get wet food regularly too.