pinwurm

An individual can sign up for a plan through their State’s health insurance exchange or the federal government’s HealthCare.gov website.

It is usually more expensive than getting it through an employer - but works to serve small business owners, freelancers, etc.

A few States (like Massachusetts) have semi-universal systems that cover all individuals that earn under 150% of poverty, independent students, newly unemployed, etc.

A lot of Americans are also covered under Medicare, Medicaid , Social Security and other programs.

Retirees aged 65 and older are eligible for Medicare - a semi-universal federal system that covers pretty much everything and accepted most places.

I met one of my closest friends on r/needafriend. Turns out, she lived like a 10 minute walk from me - and we met up over some food.

On paper, our friendship shouldn’t work. We have little in common in terms of activities and goals. But we know how to make each other laugh and ‘get’ each other’s personality. Been like 9 years.

Whether it’s Reddit, Lemmy, Discord or some other platform - there’s definitely people out there looking for the same things. Online is a good place to start.

See if your closest city has a ‘Speed Friending’ event. Here in Boston, we have “Skip the Small Talk” and you get seated with a stranger and a dialogue prompt. I found that to be really effective too.

It's been rough since 6/30. I can barely browse and leave comments in my .world account. I'm sticking to .ml for now.

it always makes me miserable to see her happy with someone else

Well, frankly - you can’t handle a friendship with her. Friends are supposed to support each other’s successes and you don’t have the capacity to be genuine about it right now.

It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person or weak or whatever. It’s human nature. It’s part of the risk we take when we have the capacity to love. Even when we want a friendship and understand that value, there remains an unskippable hurdle.

Go to the festival, but you should tell her honestly that you’re not ready to be friends - and it has nothing to do with her. And ask her to respect your boundaries in the interim.

Maybe in a few months or a year, you’ll be a better place to reconnect. Maybe by the time you’re ready, you’ll find your circle of friends to be more fulfilling and you don’t need her.

Time and space. You otherwise can’t heal if you’re constantly having sounds reopened.

Here is a list of Apps coming to Lemmy:

https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/71764

Plenty for iOS to chose from, Christian’s legacy continues. Memmy and Mlem both feel pretty close to Apollo - and are both directly inspired by it.

These apps are in early beta. They have constant updates (daily for Memmy and weekly for Mlem), so you can kind of see them being built in real time. If you’re patient with the developers, you’ll get that Apollo experience very soon. It’s like 80% of the way there.

Liftoff is pretty cool too, though it’s a different design approach.

(I’m using Memmy now, actually.)

Lemmy is Reddit.
Mastadon is Twitter.

Kbin is a bit of both.

They federate. So imagine using your Reddit account to reply to a tweet. And vice versa.

They don’t share the same servers - they just communicate with each other. Kind of like how I can use Gmail to write to a friend that uses a Yahoo Mail.

Which app?

They are two different apps with different developers/contributors and different visions.

There's huge difference in where each are in their current stage of development, but keep in mind both of the apps will look & act completely different in a few weeks.

Mlem's beta test has met it's 10K user limit, but there's still room Memmy. Give it a try. Join the Discord after and talk to the developers/contributors about what you think - they're very responsive.

They’re both forums that look and act similar to Reddit.

Fundamentally - they look different, are coded differently and have some jargon differences.
For example, the communities in Kbin are called “magazines”. A lot of folks still say “sub” as a holdover.

Yet, they’re both part of the Federation, so you can up/down vote, comment and subscribe to each other’s stuff from your home.

Federation is similar to having a group text with friends. It doesn’t matter if you have an iPhone and they have an android. It doesn’t matter if you’re on Verizon and they’re on ATT. The software is designed to communicate with each other.

Lemmy differs from Kbin in that it can be franchised into an independently owned and operated instances. So there’s multiple Lemmys like Lemmy.ml and Lemmy.world. Each instance can set its own rules and even chose which other instances/platforms it can federate without. More importantly, nobody owns all of it.

Commenting from the Memmy App beta for iOS.

Still early days, but it’s doing the basics quite well. They and Mlem are hoping for a 6/30 App Store release, so interesting times ahead.

Spez started the site to make money. This was always true - a completely typical reason to start a company. When there was no community in the early days - he made fake accounts, and fake conversations to generate traffic to attract attention. So Spez is someone that’s always used dishonesty to get what he wants.

Aaron joined the site because he saw it’s potential as a tool for civic engagement and political awareness. He left when he saw what Reddit was becoming… or really - what it always had been: a tool to extract wealth from its unknowing volunteers.

Aaron and Spez weren’t friends. They were business partners for a very short period of time. To the best of my knowledge, that’s all there is to it.

I speculate that Aaron would feel unfazed by what Reddit looks like today… because it’s expected. The founders are people that make the Forbes 30 Under 30, marry world famous pro athletes, and are worth tens of millions of dollars. They’re divorced from reality.

I would hope that open and decentralized online spaces like Lemmy reflect the sort of values & ideas Aaron spent his life advocating for.

I've got two for Lemmy.

mlem is currently being developed for iOS with around ~20 contributors. It's in early open beta, and I'm psyched because there's supposed to be a massive update between now and tomorrow.

memmy for iOS looks promising. Really intuitive 'swipe to upvote/downvote/reply' feature and browses similarly to Apollo. It's very barebones right now, the project is just a few days old and there's one developer (as far as I know).