@chartier My wife and I manage a several properties in Tucson – when we took over managing them we came to the conclusion that keeping rents down and retaining tenants for longer made more sense than raising rents and dealing with turn over every year. Property management companies in this town almost universally raise rents automatically every year and do a crap job of maintaining their buildings. When we do get an opening it never takes more than 1 or 2 days to fill it - way less stress.

@nathan @mollyjongfast Working on jumping off the bird site – mostly getting it all figured out, but I have to say the most annoying bit is that you can’t find users by their handle across federated systems. In trying to find folks that I used to follow on Twitter I need to know what Mastodon instance they’re on which is maddening. Been building my follow list slowly with numerous (slow) searches across the most popular servers. This seems like a solvable problem to me…

@ChrisKing right about the time I should be getting on the bike or the treadmill to get the numbers down my body is fully convinced it's nap time. When I started pumping it was the same deal - I could go for a ride and get some cardio in or.... *beep boop beep* just toss a bit more insulin in the system and stay on the couch. Not a great trend...

@JamesGleick seems like collecting underwear needs to be on this list somewhere...

@simonblackley @mollyjongfast Yeah, took me a while to find that under the "explore" area after turning on advanced - stumbling in the right direction...

@nathan @mollyjongfast rookie question here, so what's the process (or is there one?) to stand your own server up and then join the federation? Can just anyone do that? So it sounds like folks are just standing nodes up and attracting 4chan type folks to it and joining the federation. Interesting. I guess there are advantages and disadvantages to the non-centralized model.

@simonblackley @mollyjongfast
ok, thanks - just trying to get my head around the model - retired software guy that spent most of his career in "monolithic centralized" models. Still looking for some equivalent to the "trending topics" concept here and the like and populating my timeline with relevant follows.