Thanks for the update email the other day

No, really! I appreciate both the informative update and the overall tone of writing which reinforces my gratitude for finding and joining this instance.

If you would like, could you introduce yourself and share your thoughts in regards to the Reddit migration and the Fediverse in the !sdfpubnix ?

Digging into the Fediverse is my attempt at a return to participating in communities rather than just lurking. In the days of IRC and message boards, I was incredibly active and had ops/mod/admin duties on a few sites. I also started a site which became a community of thousands/tens of thousands. And then the toxicity took off, typical threats of doxxing and worse, the burnout came, and Facebook Groups/Reddit started obliterating forums. I withdrew from the chaos and decided to just watch from the sidelines.

The Reddit and Twitter fiascos were my wake up call to stop doom scrolling and find platforms I'd feel comfortable posting on. I'm a Spoonie (long read, but worth it to understand living with chronic health conditions) so I have very limited energy compared to my younger, healthier days online; hence my responding to an email from Tuesday on a Saturday. Supporting malicious platforms is something I don't want to devote any of my precious spoons to. But, I am trying to set aside time, or spoons, to settling in on Lemmy and Mastodon because I want to see the Fediverse succeed.

As for more personal intro info:

I grew up in the days of Atari and Apple, borrowed friends' computers to use BBSes, scrounged used parts from friends to build and upgrade my PCs and have always been tech-adjacent at the very least, but never got the chance to sink my teeth into programming, tech, etc. as deeply as I wanted. Life, amiright?

I'm a technical writer by training and trade (hey, don't judge my casual writing, okay?), a car dork, music fan, am owned by cats, and have more interests than time. Earlier this year, I completed my first-ever-entirely-from-NEW-parts PC, but I'm going back to my roots and scrounging once more to put together a box to run Ubuntu Server and Pi-hole for use here at home.

Oh, and when I saw that the SDF actually stood for the Super Dimension Fortress that always pops into my head when I see those three letters, that pretty well sealed the deal for me to give THIS particular instance a try.

Thanks for making this instance available and for all the hard work that goes into it!

Now to click the Create button for the first time and hope I didn't screw something up...