araquen

I would respectfully disagree. There is an entire system for tracking tips: https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/tip-income-is-taxable-and-must-be-reported and https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/tip-recordkeeping-and-reporting. For another, the whole tipping process was discovered by wealthy Americans:

Wealthy Americans in the 1850s and 1860s discovered the tradition, which had originated in medieval times as a master-serf custom wherein a servant would receive extra money for having performed superbly well, on vacations in Europe. Wanting to seem aristocratic, these individuals began tipping in the United States upon their return. https://time.com/5404475/history-tipping-american-restaurants-civil-war/

In an ideal world, service industry workers would be paid a living wage, and there would be no tips required. That’s how it should be.

Ultimately, tips are a way for “owners" to avoid paying fair wages, using the customer base to subsidize the employee’s wages. I won’t even go into instances where the owners steal tips from their staff.

Do some people under-report tips? Probably. But will most service workers, who can barely afford to survive in this country, incur the risk of being audited by the IRS if they don’t report tips and get penalized thousands of dollars for their meager hundreds? I very much doubt it. And yes, the IRS does go after the little guy - a lot. It’s cheaper than going after rich people with lawyers.

Ok, it does take some doing, and hopefully the fediverse devs might figure out a better hand-off, but this is SOP in the fediverse right now:

1. Search for the server you are interested in.
2. Go to the server page
3. Go to the upper right corner where the server is identified. In the blue field, you will see: "You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [identifier]"
4. Copy the identifier.
5. Go back to your home server and paste the identifier into the search field
6. The server in question should show as a search result.
7. Click on the link within the search result.
8. You should be redirected to the site you are looking for, and in the upper right corner you will see the ability to subscribe to that site.

It’s a few more steps but it is effectively the same process for both Lemmy and Mastodon. Mastodon just has a more compact interface so you can have the information on the same screen.

It becomes fairly easy after a few tries. What I suggest is having two tabs open - one with your server and one where you will be searching for new servers, that way you just need to flip between windows.

Unfortunately, Christian effectively vetoed Apollo for Lemmy, but there is an iOS app in active development: Mlem. The team seems passionate and last I heard there are about 8K testers hammering away at the app. You can get Mlem via TestFlight.

The icons are gorgeous, and I like the idea that Beehaw basically has “branding” on their communities. This proves a visual clue to folks new to a fediverse where a particular community is coming from. It would be nice if more servers did similar.

I wonder if at a future point, folks who signed up on Beehaw as their “home server” could get a yellow hexagon frame for their avatar. It would help visually unite and convey the idea of the user and their local environment while reinforcing the idea of what a fediverse does.

I would say to breathe deep and take your time. Lemmy is not a clone of Reddit, and it shouldn’t be viewed as, say you would compare functionality between 2 third-party Reddit apps.

Think of it as coming in to a new MMO after having played the old one for many years. Some things will be familiar, and some things will be different. Some mechanics may feel like a “step backwards” while others are cool additions.

Lemmy isn’t new, but it’s getting fresh eyes on its user experience and that is a good thing. And unlike Reddit, each community/server/whathaveyou can be far more responsive to their users feedback. That said, not every response will be a “yes” but you don’t have requests filtering through various levels of technological red tape, which I understand has been a challenge for the Reddit moderators, who still do not have the necessary tools to effectively moderate their subreddits.

When I first joined Beehaw, and saw, originally, a “lack” of diverse subreddits (including my mainstays) I was a bit disappointed, but then I thought to myself: “damn the torpedoes, I’m just gonna wing it” and subscribed to a bunch of communities that looked promising.

I’ve been on Lemmy since the disastrous AMA and have not looked back. I’ve even engaged more in these last 5 days on Lemmy/Beehaw than in the last year on Reddit. And while I still miss my 250+ subreddits (including r/superbowl and the subreddits I collected as part of a Reddit gestalt (r/inthesoulstone, the subreddit for Purple button pushers, r/buddhistasfuck (created as a lark, someone posted it wouldn’t last a day and I stayed to prove them wrong, and while it was a quiet subreddit, every once in a while someone would post something they thought was “extremely” buddhist)) the Lemmy communities have provided more meaningful interactions. Plus, Lemmy will create its own gestalts, and I’ll have new ways to experience the never-ending stream of random data tidbits I have grown to crave.

Who is that spooky undead axe midget?

That’s Durotan’s crotch.

https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Crotchety_Axe_Guy

This was the mindset that drove Harrison out of The Beatles. I might have the anecdote wrong, but what I gather was Lennon was always the band’s leader, but when he started to “check out” (as someone put it, he basically “won the lottery” as far as fame and fortune and was distractedly in love), McCartney stepped up to “substitute lead” and was a bit overbearing. Harrison, being largely ignored and dismissed finally said “I’m done” which served as a slap Lennon and McCartney needed.

McCartney has a hubris which never changed. I am fairly certain he truly believes that he is doing the right thing and that George would have approved if he could have heard the recovered vocals.

I just don’t know if this could truly be a “Beatles” song, “Yesterday” notwithstanding, without some input from George as well, but I can’t see that happening - it would be a monumental coincidence if there was some track Harrison had that somehow dovetailed into an unfinished fragment of a track Lennon left behind. The only way I could possibly see it is if Dhani Harrison is somehow involved to speak on his father’s behalf.

I’m old and easily bamboozled by all this newfangled tech, and at first the whole fediverse thing was overwhelming. But eventually I realized it was not too different than an MMO’s multiple servers, and the idea of cross-realm and connected realms, and it functions not that much differently than a network mesh. You have multiple stand-alone nodes that are capable of cross-communications, so participate in a shared experience, and if one of the nodes goes down, the network will work around it.

It’s really not complicated once you give yourself time to think. And as long as the interface allows for the aggregation of random tidbits of data as we were accustomed to with Reddit, how the technology feeds that is not something the average user needs to worry about.

The only real difference between Reddit and Lemmy is that there is a bit more “hard wiring” that needs to be done by the user in order to set up a custom feed on Lemmy, but other than that, the user experience isn’t dreadfully different once the dust settles.

Yeah, it is a bit of a challenge. What I did was go to here: https://kbin.social/m/fediverse/t/4331 and find a community that I had as a subreddit. In the upper right corner, there is a blue dialog box and at the bottom there is an identifier. You copy that identifier, then go to your home server, go to search and paste that identifier. One of the search results should be that server, and you can then just hit “subscribe.”

It’s the same with Mastodon.

That said, if your server shows a listing of Communities, you might be able to subscribe from that list. Beehaw offers that.

I would absolutely use “PC Part Picker” because as you assemble the various components, that site will tell you if there are incompatibilities. For instance whether a power supply will fit in the case.

https://pcpartpicker.com

And if you don’t have someone to bounce ideas off of, this is a pretty good site that was recommended to me to help narrow your choices.

https://www.logicalincrements.com

Think of the “Lemmyverse” as the ground floor in relation to your Reddit experiences. Like a new MMO when comparing with the maturity of WoW. Some things will feel a little awkward for not having the polish, but there are other mechanics that are new and engaging. The more people who engage on Lemmy, Beehaw, et. al., and the longer the engagement, the better the experience will get. I think of it more like a diamond in the rough, instead of it being a “lesser” version of Reddit.

The difference here is that your investment (of your time) can’t be undercut by a greedy CEO. A fediverse is “self healing.” It’s like setting up a mesh - one node could go bad but the network itself will survive.

Awesome, thank you!