Well, in that regards, they’re similar to blahaj, as in, our instance doesn’t just have trans communities. Our user base is focused on trans and gender diverse folk however. Hexbear, similarly, has all sorts of communities, but their userbase is focused on shared politics, even though their areas of discussion are not restricted to that.

Hexbear is very protective of it’s trans users and it has a lot of them. But its “specialist area” is politics.

I think it’s a good thing, because it discourages centralisation. If we end up with a bunch of specialist instances, then diversity suffers, because everyone looking for a specific area will end up on the one single specialist instance dedicated to it.

And I say that as the admin of an instance focused on the trans and gender diverse folk. There is a reason that we don’t enforce specialisation on those topics in our instance communities though. Even so, we still tend to be “the trans instance”, when I’d much prefer it if we were just one of many, like we are on the microblog part of the fediverse.

On the chance that you’re engaging honestly, rather than just trolling…

WhatsApp, Roblox and Signal all run fine in Linux.

This is the ProtonDB page for Roblox. https://www.protondb.com/app/2181790. ProtonDB is a database that assesses how well windows games run under linux, and in this case, Roblox is Gold rated.

There are numerous WhatsApp apps and wrappers that run under linux, and Signal has an official Linux version found here https://signal.org/download/linux/

Sorry, I was trying to be outright hostile, not passively.

There are no widely federated edgelord instances at this point in time

You’re right about that, and if I ever do go back, that will be why! But the sameness I was talking about is more the cultural identities of the countries. Every place we stayed felt like it could be transplanted to Australia, and fit right in. It might be different if I wasn’t Australian :)

I’ve never been to the US, so I can’t say I won’t go there again, but I can say I won’t go there at all.

But in terms of countries I have been to, probably New Zealand. There’s nothing wrong with New Zealand, but it feels too much like Australia, and baring me suddenly developing an unlimited amount of time and money, there are other places I would rather go

I use Kagi. Paying for a search engine isn’t something that I ever saw myself doing, but I do honestly believe it’s the only way they can exist that means the users are the customers instead of the product.

The thing that makes them right wing is the exclusions they place on their “progressive” policies. It’s always the vulnerable

Swedish right-wing populist party Sverigedemokraterna explicitly support that:

They don’t support housing for everyone because they don’t believe that non western foreigners should be allowed in to the country, and they don’t believe that people who aren’t “culturally Danish” are citizens.

So they don’t believe in housing for all

German right-wing populist party Alternative für Deutschland is led by a lesbian who calls her party "the only real protective force for gays and lesbians in Germany

They’re an explicitly transphobic party who doesn’t extend queer rights to trans people, even if they’re gay or lesbian. They actively practice discrimination against LGBTQ folk.

To answer it seriously, for me, it’s not specifically cis, but more broadly, queer. I need someone who has faced the assumptions that society forces on them and knows how to exist in the world anyway, having faced those assumptions, questioned them and found their own relationship with themselves.

tl;dr I need people who have had to question who they are and find themselves, rather than someone who has never had to answer those questions.

In my experience (as a trans woman who has experienced both sides of this coin), I can no longer get away with being topless in most situations. However, I can get away with wearing less in more situations. It’s acceptable for me to wear a short cut, sleeveless tank top or boob tube in situations where it would be difficult for a guy to wear a singlet or other sleeveless top.

We run our own custom image caching setup. I’ll ask Kaity to look in to it and see what’s going on

I can “see” the stem, the striations of color, the shape, the imperfections move as the apple rotates

I have aphantasia, and I can’t do this.

Yep, blahaj.zone admin :)

Sadly, it only runs on genuinely ancient smart phones. I can’t even re-purpose my old pre-loved phones that I’ve kept after upgrading, because most of them are still too new for postmarketos

The term threadiverse to describe the “reddit like” fediverse network predates Zuckerbergs latest bigotry factory.

The instance stance is that we don’t allow people to undermine other folks identities. Transmeds think they’re doing the “right thing” for trans folk because they think that they’re protecting the “real” trans folk. People who want to undermine non binary identities, people who want to undermine therian identities etc, people who want to undermine neopronoun users, will always have a reason for it, often based around acceptability in the eyes of broader cishet society.

Just because you think there is a good reason to undermine those specific identities doesn’t make it ok. You and I, and anyone else is not the arbiter of anyones identities except their own, and the moment you feel that you do get to have an opinion on the validity of someone elses identity, is the moment you have put yourself above them.

There are absolutely trolls who will misuse this kind of acceptance. But even that doesn’t make it ok for you or I to install ourselves as arbitrators of other folks identity. The answer to the trolls doesn’t change just because they’re trolling by bad faith use of identity. The answer still remains that you remove them when they’re trolling becomes apparent. But on this instance, that removal is done in a way that doesn’t empower folk looking for excuses to invalidate others.

I have complete aphantasia. No mental sounds, imagery, etc.

But even so, I think I probably didn’t word my reply as well as I could have.

Stuff with genuine interpersonal interactions, with characters that have personality and feelings, that stuff I can read. But that’s because it doesn’t rely on the visual.

But if the erotica is just a verbal description intended to help picture a scene, then it’s not of any interest to me