Rentlar

Teaching financial literacy to Americans would cause irreparable harm to American lending institutions.

All depends on how much time you have before you lose important stuff without a bailout, and how far underwater you are on expenses minus your after witholdings paycheque. I'm going to assume you have a bit of time to think, then act, enough that you won't risk anything without drastic immediate action.

Step 1 (Budget): Look through your bills, card statements, receipts, determine how much you spent vs. how much you got paid, for recurring expenses, essentials and all the rest.

If the difference is less than about $US 500 a month or 250 per biweekly paycheque, you should be able to cut expenses enough that you can break even. More than $500 means moving to somewhere new, back with your parents, getting a new job that pays more, getting a second job on top will be options that are more worth it than just squeezing your budget can reasonably do. Now stay calm, go into this with a clear head and the confidence that you can work yourself out of your current situation.

Step 2a (Cut expenses): If you have a less than 500/mo shortfall, your goal is to cut $5/month out from up to 100 places.

• Cut Netflix, Amazon, streaming services, magazine subscriptions, gym membership, any monthly luxury thing that has tied your leg to a chain. Cut, cut, cut.
• Buy cheap, filling foods: beans, potatoes, cucumbers, rice, carrots, bread, milk. Buy dollar store plastic lunch containers to hold stuff in and meal prep for yourself every week. Every meal in a month that you make yourself instead of eating out saves you $15, minimum.
• Internet and cellphone, change providers and find a better "2-year introductory offer", if your current phone has a balance, well you can't do as much but you should pay it off if it's $100 or less, stick with it and get cheaper BYOD plans from now on.
• Check your credit-card, loan balances.
• Do your best never to buy more on your CC than you can pay off that month, keep a zero balance if you can. If you have a balance racked up, and nothing like a Line of Credit to move it to, then well just make minimum payments but this is the top priority to tackle once you are in the black and you want to clear that ASAP.
• If you have loans, ask for alternative payment plan options, interest deferrals, something that can give you 6 to 12 months of breathing room.
• Never EVER get payday loans, they will screw you over.
• Shop around if you can attain better rates for auto, home, health and rental insurance. Especially if you've recently turned 25, then insurance companies will fuck you over much less than before.

2b (Increase income or change living situation): Follow most of the same advice across the thread, highlights:

• Apply for jobs where you are, and in other cities across the country where rents you've checked are reasonable.
• Look for seasonal weekend work to supplement your current income.
• There's a lot of need for blue collar work, many will train on the job, and over time, help you get your 'tickets'/qualifications to do more specialized and well paying work. Call up the trade unions, some may have spots.
• Municipal work pays well and lower barrier to entry
• Overseas online teaching math and english is a way I know how some of my friends job searching are supplementing their current existence.

Step 3: Stay healthy, keep your chin up, don't be afraid to ask for help. You shouldn't act desperate, you have many options here but don't let your pride/empathy take away your car and home.

There are a lot of communities, certainly a wide swath could use more signs of life than they have at present.

So far the only things coming close to Reddit live threads are political events and silly Fediverse drama.

We have some areas that see good discussion, you're right that we are missing long, meaningful discussion chains, as long Lemmy chains are usually either two users arguing getting nowhere, or a classic Reddit-style meme chain (the "and my axe!" type of reply), otherwise you're on [email protected]. Those don't need to be any longer than they already are.

You aren't the first to bring up sports, we have hockey and baseball "live threads", but sports fans haven't shown up in these parts en masse just yet.

"Nothing" is a perfectly valid answer. Even if development on Lemmy is slower than many would like, it is improving on the technical side. I'm sure excited for future progress.

Yeah, I try to save my snarky or sarcastic comments to top level replies about the article itself, I could do better for certain.

Maintaining a good vibe is an important issue, I used to be more active on Beehaw which was all about that and I still am cognizant of it when I comment there.

[email protected] is one of the cooler communities with your frequent photo posts, we could use a lot more of communities like those.

Ultimately the points don't matter, yet it genuinely feels bad when you or someone that you're certain is posting in good faith gets downvoted, which we need to deal with if we want to encourage posting. Stuff like hiding scores for 20 minutes or vote fuzzing can deal with this issue, but at the same time, I do appreciate having the transparency that Reddit had taken away for years.

A lot of negative news coming in (which has been over the past month) does get reflected in the snarkiness of my comments, but I know that maintaining a positive tone adds a feedback loop for the non-trolls to contribute positively or at least interact genuinely. In threads like this, I try to reward people that have contributed with a similar effort reply.

I'd like posts and replies with videos or galleries attached in Mastodon to be visible on Lemmy.

Searching from within Reddit has always been terrible, Lemmy's internal search is very slightly better imo to that low bar. Search engine results are an interesting challenge just because of the way federation works, it's information accessible from all sorts of pages.

I'd imagine to get something like that to work, we'd need a proper "Fedisearch" tool that can crawl and aggregate content across the entire ActivityPub Fediverse to reduce duplication, then search engines would hook into those results, rather than trying to make the Fediverse compatible with SEO algorithms.

I understand the appeal, and I like these types of video posts too sometimes. It's hard for me to say what is the correct amount because I wouldn't like Lemmy to turn into the Tiktok form that Youtube, Instagram, Reddit have adopted from the mass of brainless short-form video content.

Attaching video media to posts is harder in Lemmy than it is in Mastodon, that is something that could be improved.

I getcha and you've made your stance on this issue very clear: Biden isn't the ideal Democrat candidate, and you've provided ample sources to back it. Just saying that Biden isn't the only thing there is to talk about in the world or in US politics!

There have been a few comments on helping niche communities thrive.

While tagging and inbuilt community grouping on the software side would be helpful, I suggest posting to small community, then crosspost to the overarching category that is more active with a mention of the original thread.

I look forward to it! Some of the best moments in post-exodus history are the chains of memes spontaneously created from funny posts/comments (poop, beans, jeans, etc.)

Definitely some ideas for more network wide events like canvas, Lemmyvision would be fun!

I get a sense that people (including me) hesitate to be the very first to post in a community after a few weeks or more without activity.

I think there's no real need for that, even if that post doesn't get traction, chances are there will be a post inspired by that post which starts a cycle.

I suggest people who are worried about visibility try posting in a small community, and then crosspost it to a popular community (e.g. posting an Age of Empires discussion in both [email protected] and [email protected]), until things get off the ground.