Health-related communities, particularly those for specific medical conditions. Those are the communities that really become a lifeline for people, help them through diagnoses or just difficult times, and can serve as an excellent resource. I was active on r/diabetes_t1 on Reddit and am trying to get a community started here on Lenny.world (!T1diabetes).
Depends on the app you’re using but usually you just click on the hashtag of interest and then click on the + button or something similar in the upper right corner of the screen. That’s how you do it in both Mona and Ivory.
I like mastodon but the content you see is only driven by two things: the people you follow and the hashtags you follow. Basically, you follow people and hashtags to effectively create your own “algorithm.” Once I understood this and really made an effort to follow both people and hashtags that interested me, my Mastodon feed became way more interesting than my Twitter feed.
I also like the quality of the interactions better on Mastodon. Because of how the whole thing works, you’re not going to get bombarded with horrible stuff in most cases (at least the chances seem to be far less for that kind of thing happening).
But it definitely takes more time and energy to curate compared to Twitter.
A lot of this has more to do with the mindset people approached Twitter with than the service itself. Honestly, I always approached Twitter the way you describe Mastodon here. I just wanted to find people who had interests similar to mine and connect with them, as well as find interesting news. Maybe that’s why moving from Twitter to Mastodon has been to seamless. Just a lot less anger and hate on Mastodon from what I’ve experienced. A much nicer atmosphere.
Started a small mutual fund and retirement fund when I was just starting out and still in undergrad. I did not have much and was fully self sufficient. But someone came to my job and showed us how retirement plans worked and convinced me to start one. Same with a mutual fund. I never put more than $20-$40 in each because I didn’t have much but boy did that pay off.
I purchased a small condo in the city with some of the money I put away in #1. Just sold it recently (20 years after purchasing it; lived in it for 5 years, rented it out for a profit for 15 years). I made a lot of money off that sale. More money than I’ve ever seen at once.
My spouse and I have always lived below our means. Now we’re not frugal - we go out for nice dinners, travel, have kids. We also have good jobs. But, when we purchased a house we could have afforded to get one that was $600k and instead opted for a smaller townhome in a nice neighborhood for almost half the price. Living this way has paid off more than I could have ever imagined. Both of us don’t have to work. We travel whenever we want. We could technically both stop working in our 40s/50s and probably be fine. It’s a feeling of freedom. We’ve never over-extended ourselves. When our colleagues and friends were buying expensive homes and expensive cars and extending themselves, we just didn’t do that.