First, I'm sorry that you find yourself in this situation.

Second, there's no magic bullet that's going to get you out of this. A tight budget might help, and perhaps tinkering at the edges might get you a little closer.

There's a few things that might help:

1. Check what your paying for what. Can you save a few bucks by switching contacts? Phone companies are crap at offering good deals to existing customers, for example. Make sure your not paying for any long-forgotten warranty given in your account.

2. Upskill yourself: things like Alison offer free training, and a small cost for the certificate. While not enough to match a degree, that can give you the leg up to the next pay band. Often worth checking out New Skills Academy as well for offers.

3. Check out your local college/university for free short courses. Many of them will do short courses that can help improve you're CV. Even if they are just in a subject you're interested in, having a university course on a CV can really help.

4. Google your CV type: every type of work has a different CV requirement. Some want the biggest qualification first, some want a skill profile. We've all been taught to do a CV, but there are hundreds of different ways to do it. Check out what's popular in your line of work, and update accordingly

5. Job hunt now: if your current job isn't paying the bills, it's time to job hunt. Look at the salary you need, then what you need to know to do the job. If you have 70% of what they are asking for, apply. Luck plays a bigger part in job hunting than we like to think.

6. Side hustle or not to side hustle: if you have a salaried job with regular hours, check your contract. It's always good to know what requirements your current job has on having a second job. If your not feeling like a content creator, then Only Fans may not be for you: unless you happen to be really well endowed with good features. If that's out, consider an evening job or weekend job. You might be able to pick up a few hours stacking shelves at your corner shop, or on the till/cash register. Two nights a week might be enough to help you make those ends meet. You can also try side-hustles like dog walking, or handy-person. Perhaps even a paid befriending service for the elderly (be aware there may be legal requirements in your area)

7. Plan: having a goal helps keep you focused. Knowing what job you'd like to do will help you work out what training and skills you need. Having a goal being that can also make the grind of two jobs easier as you can see yourself building towards a goal.

These are some broad-brush ideas that I hope gives you the idea that is it's not totally hopeless.

There are two tensions here:

1. Community building
2. Code production

Community building can be done without any coding, coding can be done without any community. However, to build a large project you need them both.

In a large volunteer project like this, not everything can be worked on. You become selective. We are going to major on this thing, or specifically talk about that project to get community engagement and get the thing done. This drives the project, she helps it to stop chasing hairs. Someone has to decide what feature is going in this release to make it ready to be a release candidate.

That group of people, ultimately making and influencing those decisions, is the CoC.

Let's take a for-instance: Sign up boxes.

For years, Linux sign up allows you to record random data into your profile, office, phone number, etc. These are text, and can be anything. Now, what if there's a rising need to add a minicom number(minix, used to be used by the deaf to send messages to an organisation, before email). As a hearing person, this is going to be a low priority for me, so I work on something else. I've got spare capacity, so if the project leaders are calling for help on this thing, I can go and help.

This, ultimately, builds a better over-all product, but it's not something I'd have noticed by myself, because I'm not part of the deaf community.

In our example with NixOS, asking for someone from the community to be a representative on it is not about code quality, but about the issue of visibility. Is there some need that that section of the community needs? Is there a way that the community can do y thing to make the os as a whole more accessible? I don't know the answer, because I'm not a member of that community, just as I'm not a member of the deaf community.

In this case, the merit, the qualification, for being on the CoC is being a member of a section of the community. It brings valuable a viewpoint, and adds a voice at the table that can make a real difference. Most coders know that having a wish list of features at the start can make it infinitely easier to add them, than having to go back an rewrite to make them happen. Having a voice that might need that feature makes a difference

The debate for CoC is about merit, but merit isn't just stubbornly focused on a single talent, it can also be about life experience.

Choose an unclear gender (other, agender, etc) and your data becomes less useful. Marketing campaigns are based on broad categories, like male or female, so choosing neither lowers your data's value.

Similarly, lie about your education and your employment. Pick a made up job, be a wizard, or a spaceman. Jobs, again, are wide categories, so nonsense jobs, the more niche the better, the less they have to market things to you.

In theory you can do the same with hobbies, but three points of data, even made up data, is sellable somewhere.

Lie, of course, if you can. I'm sure there are more denizens of Hell on Facebook than the real place.

Where possible, choose other.

I see what you did there.

Oh lookit! Trying to fleece people using your product in good faith backfires.

Who'd have think?/s

Damn, screwed twice by the same Ape...

In the modern world, I'm not sure a blog without advertising is going to work - especially hosted on your own domain.

You will have better luck with substack or koffi, who's search algorithms will at least suggest related sites - and increase your visibility.

For decent views you are going to need a way of generating audience - that used to be Facebook and Twitter, but Twitter is dead, and Facebook is showing reduced returns of a saturated market. However, reduced is but 0, so it's still worth throwing up a page.

After that, a public Mastodon profile will help in audience creation, but that's very much a slow burn, and you'll have to make sure you #tag properly.

I would be very interested in the list of banned books, and how it would be curated.

For 64gb, you might have to extend the years to be: banned books ever, and then break down that list by reason. Just to fill space you'd end up including dubious books, and you'd need to be clear on where/who/why a book got banned.

A book being 'banned' from a pre-school for being 'not age appropriate' by some pointless helicopter parent wouldn't count unless the book was actually age appropriate.

Then you would need a category of 'banned by author banned'(or similar). Books that were considered age appropriate at the time, but now definitely aren't. I'm thinking here of the recent removal/editing of Dr Seuss books to remove problematic racial stereotype. Not necessarily banned in their original form, perhaps, but still censored (perhaps, rightly so for the target age).

64GB is a lot of books. You would end up even including 'The tale of (Darth) Pelagius'

(Pelagius was considered a heretic in the early years of the church, and his writings were banned)

An incredibly well-written piece. Even if the subject matter and conclusion are chilling.

I don't know if there is, but it feels like the email protocol problem.

Like, while the protocol sucks in many, many ways, it would take something revolutionary to replace it because it's everywhere.

It's been around so long that everything talks the protocol, the binaries that handle it are mature and stable.

Then you have to ask: what would you replace it with? It does the job it's designed to do very well. There's nothing the matter with the protocol, and it's still fit-for-purpose.

That doesn't mean there aren't problems - spam, bad actors, and so on, but ultimately that's not the fault of the protocol (though, maybe, for email, people have been arguing about protocol-level ways of dealing with spam for years).

I don't have an answer, but I feel like there should be one, but I doubt the is.

However, unlike Reddit, there's alternatives. You might not like the community on @lemmy.world, but you might like the community on @anotherlemmythatmight.exist.

Because of the federated nature, communities will naturally fracture and focus. Here, a bad faith mod will just kill a community on instance a, and people will move to instance b.

We've already seen things happen like this under the banner of 'free speech', where people believe that free speech means free from consequences. If you think that, there are plenty of instances out there. Lemmy.world isn't one of them.

This means that you can find your favourite community in places with different server rules. Which means it will be the community - the people, the mods, the knowledge, that grows one, not just the fact the names taken.

You may want to look into Lutris. They've done a lot of work on bringing windows games to Linux, and basically do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.

It will also link to your Steam, EA, Origen, Cog etc accounts and do the same for games there as well.