I tried to get mine to join, but my girlfriend spent a few hours here on a Saturday morning. She looked up my username, saw how much grief I got just for advocating third-party voting, and decided everyone here is way too extreme and hateful.

Which might be true, but she also played Grow a Garden on roblox while we watched the super awesome Charlie Sheen documentary on Netflix last night, so I can’t take her judgment too seriously.

This worked, I found a local club. :)

thank you! This is SUPER helpful!

Yep, I’m US-based, so I’ll do that. I live in a mid-sized city, so we should have some radio clubs.

Good points. I should do that first rather than way. I’ll look on amazon today for a smaller one so I just get on air right now!

Thanks. There is so much stuff to know. Just jumping into this today, I’ve been down so many rabbit holes!

And as for my radio shack, actually I do want it to be stand alone structure in my backyard. So it’ll be my mancave since my gf already hates how much stuff I have around everywhere.

I just wish it wasn’t so expensive to get in. Hopefully I can find everything decently priced as I find my way.

I actually ran my own crooked little pirate station back when acne and hormones were still my main drama. My command center was my grandfather’s “radio shack,” and yes, that was people called HAM radio set-ups.

It smelled like dust, old wires, and pipe tobacco. I’d sneak in, crank up punk records, and talk all kinds of shi about my high school like I was Wolfman Jack with a cheap mic and a chip on my shoulder. There was some some movie that came out about that time about a teen running a pirate radio station that his high school listened to, and I thought it was awesome.

For six glorious months, I broadcasted into the void as a one-man revolution pumping static and anger into the uni. Then my gramps got a letter that threatened a fine so monstrous it could have bought ten lifetimes of gas station burritos. Ten grand!!

My audience was basically one guy, and that one guy never helped me get laid. So that was the end of my pirate radio empire.

Good points, but the reality is it’s still tiny compared to mainstream platforms. The communities are smaller, the reach is limited, and a lot of the conversations I care about still happen on places like Reddit or even mainstream social media.

I enjoy the Fediverse for what it is and support the idea behind it, but I can’t fully leave the bigger platforms yet because that’s still where most of the people and content are.