There’s a difference between support and pointing out blatant US propaganda. Like I said above, many people across the fediverse don’t get the nuance of being critical of US narratives does not equal supporting the regimes that are on the recieving end of that propaganda. If you really spent any amount of time on .ml you’d see there is plenty of criticism of Russia/China, just not to the extent where everyone unquestioningly takes any criticism by US sources at face value.

Wherever it stems from it’s getting annoying to deal with the influx of “enlightened centrists” that have the idea that anyone left of Biden/Harris is a secret Russian/Chinese disinfo agent :/

Don’t worry about the other posters trying to dissuade you from lemmy.ml. It’s a very chill instance. It gets flack because it is run by and has a majority leftist base, but that shouldn’t be an issue if you consider yourself a progressive. The “tankie” slurs are frankly b.s. and disingenuous. I wouldn’t call the sub “pro-Russia/China” by any means, the users are anti-imperialist and realistic in the nature of US propaganda depicting other states as bogeymen. Just because you question the mainstream US-centric narrative doesn’t mean you’re shilling for China/Russia etc. There’s a lot of liberals and centrists, that despite their progressive sentiments they may hold, are still very beholden to the narrative of American exceptionalism in a lot of ways.

It’s seriously getting old at this point. I’ve noticed there’s been an uptick in hostility towards lemmy.ml over the past year. I can only assume it’s related to the reddit migration. Unfortunately I only forsee it getting worse as more people migrate over.

Call me crazy, but this is why I have been thinking about getting into hobbies where I can make my own tools. I like to journal, and have a fountain pen with ink, but it occurred to me that I could just make my own ink and paper. So much of what we do nowadays for enjoyment is via manufactured things. It’s an unfortunate by-product of a consumer society that even the hobbies that we partake in are themselves a consumptive act. That’s not to say that we should all forgo any kind of external products and just make everything ourselves, I too like a good book, piece of vinyl or comic like anyone else. But it is definitely something to consider the degree to which our lives revolve around some type of product consumption. I think that we’d all benefit from taking some time to consider finding hobbies that don’t rely on buying some type of product.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently as well. I decided that I wanted to ditch using any cell carrier in favor of a VoIP provider. I made a post here: https://lemmy.ml/post/26192657.

The two recommendations that came up the most were voip.ms and jmp.chat. Both require at least $15 to get started but you can port your old number over to both services too. From there jmp.chat is $5 a month, which comes with unlimited texts and 120 min a month.

With voip.ms the call and messaging is subtracted from your balance at a predetermined rate (per min and per text) which I haven’t worked out the math on how much mileage $15 will get you initially.

From what I could see jmp.chat looked like it was the easier option to setup, with the Cheogram app for your phone and a Jabber app for the computer. Here’s a wiki entry detailing how to setup jmp.chat: https://kb.above.im/jmp-chat/

I settled on discontinuing my mint service and setting up jmp.chat on my phone and computer, and then supplementing the limited minutes via Signal for calling. Seems like a pretty good alternative to me. I still have a week left on my phone plan, and then I’ll be taking the plunge. I’d been using my phone less and less lately so it wont be too much of a shock, and I’ll save myself an extra $20/month going from the $25 mint plan to $5/month jmp.chat plan.