I’ll mention some dead projects, in case anyone gets an itch to pick them up…

lotide/hitide is a minimalist, text-only platform. It has been abandoned.
https://sr.ht/~vpzom/lotide/. https://lotide.fbxl.net/

Sublinks was in the works, but it is on indefinite hiatus. As I understand it, the main dev became too busy IRL to continue work.
https://github.com/sublinks

I assume it’s an intentional trade-off by the devs to reduce the storage burden. If each instance is a complete mirror of all federated instances then hosting becomes that much more expensive.

Free is good, of course. But I also have some gripes about how Band functions so I’m interested to see what else is out there. Thanks for the Campfire recommendation; I will check it out.

There are lots of arguments in favor of environmental protections even if someone thinks CO2 is not an issue. Think smog over major cities, or rivers being too polluted to swim in, or oil spills. You can’t eat the fish you catch in many water bodies because of industrial contamination with heavy metals and PCBs. Mine tailings leach chemicals out into lakes and rivers. This is all very visible stuff that cannot be waved away with vague doubts.

You can counter the “drill baby drill” people by pointing out that using up our oil first makes us dependent on other countries in the future. Given that the world has a finite supply of oil, it’s smart to keep ours in the ground as much as possible. Hold on to that domestic oil as a future “strategic reserve,” and focus on developing renewables for our daily energy needs.

Hail to thou, Sol Invictus,
Unconquered, unmatched, and undivided

Well-meaning people: We are requiring the city to install X miles of bicycle infrastructure!

City: Slaps some paint in the right lane of a busy road and calls it a bike path. Done!

After digging into it, we banned the two sh.itjust.works accounts mentioned in this post. A quick search of the database did not reveal any similar accounts, though that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.