I can’t help you with the political side because as long as the place is LGBTQ±friendly and anti-bigotry I tend not to care, and I try to avoid overtly political spaces online for my own peace of mind. But as an LGBTQ+ agnostic who was raised with a religious background, I can tell you some places I found on Reddit. I know it’s kind of sacrilege to direct people there, especially on the Fediverse where a lot of us left Reddit for here, but I figure looking for people who will accept you instead of tossing vitriol your way takes priority here, just like I would not begrudge anyone who relies on r/stopdrinking for staying.

No idea what your religion is, this reflects my own background, so sorry in advance if it is not useful, but at least you’ll know you are not alone.

r/QueerTheology, r/OpenChristian and a ton of the Related Subreddits on their sidebar. I remember r/OpenCatholic, r/GayChristians. If you click around on the sidebars of these I think they can also help you find related places for other religions and being LGBTQ+. I swear there was a subreddit for leftist Christians but I don’t remember the name anymore. It might have died in the API drama or not.

Although as far as I know you might want to know that this is a place for promoting a new community, not searching for one. Not actually sure where you are supposed to go to search for one, though…

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I was literally typing a reply about how it still is useful to onlookers and how I have had my mind changed as a third party witness to online arguments before, and then I saw this. Thanks for doing that!

That’s how I felt about Kbin way back when. I hope PieFed grows and works out!

This is exactly why I chose Mbin: to help diversify Threadiverse software.

I appreciate people like you.

Is that still good? I heard about some old music piracy sites now being flooded with viruses and the like. I don’t feel like having to be careful with what I download so I’ll probably resort to a YouTube to mp3 downloader since most of what I have is probably posted on YouTube, and I am not one of those people who can detect a difference in audio quality with different file types. I appreciate the help!

Younger person in my 20s. Most of my friends use Spotify. I grew up buying music on iTunes and will continue to do that. I also have little interest in discovering new music and a preference for straight-up owning instead of streaming something I do not own. (Yes, I am aware I should probably go reread the TOS to see if I actually own or if Apple can remotely take my “ownership” away and back up the files like mad.) But I know my approach is uncommon amongst my social group.

I do not have CDs and will not buy one. I know of their use for backing things up. I keep external hard drives but otherwise do not really like physical media and want to keep the count of physical things I have down. Another thing to collect dust, to have to try to keep nice because I like things to look nice, and to be heartbroken about when I inevitably spill something on it/scratch it/otherwise break or damage it, whether in a “it will lose functionality” way or just a superficial way. I’ll avoid the pain and just go digital.

I am also just not much of a merch person. I might donate money to support musicians but please don’t give me a T-shirt I’ll never want to wear (they are not my style, I might buy clothing if it actually fits my style but merch clothing almost always doesn’t) or a poster I’ll never hang up. If I like your music I might buy sheet music to play it myself. Better be accurate though, not a simplification, or I’ll turn up my nose and transcribe it myself. Can’t guarantee I’ll have perfect results, but I will be closer to the original than the simplified piano/vocal/maybe guitar scores that are often put out.

I also don’t know what skibidi toilet is, besides a meme that really belongs to people a decade younger than me. I don’t care to find out but I am happy to let them have their fun.

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Sorry! One thing Kbin doesn’t do and that Lemmy seems to do sometimes is telling me, without me clicking on the user’s profile, which platform and instance a poster is posting from.

As a Kbin user, microblogs definitely are not all the posts we make here. We can both microblog through “Add new post” and make a thread through “Add new link”, “Add new thread”, and “Add new photo”.

Genuine question, as a non-Twitter user, what was Twitter-style discussion that held value like? I only ever heard about it being a quick source for certain official outlets to broadcast to others (which does have value but that’s not discussion), a place for political fighting and harassment, and about how you weren’t able to have nuanced discussions within the small character limit.

I know one advantage of Mastodon is that the character limit is much higher.

I was always annoyed by the “LMAO everyone pathetic nerd stereotype” thing they did on Reddit, only partially because it assumed everyone was a man desperate for sex from a woman. Is this comment an attempt at a joke or a genuine assessment?

I may be a nerd and it is probably fair to say most Fediverse users are. But I’m not a basement-dweller stereotype and I’m not sure where that comes from aside from the tired old Reddit joke about all its users being that exact stereotype.

Also, again, network effects. Go where advice exists on a nice wiki, not where it’s a new community and maybe 1 person will answer your comment if you are lucky—a lot of people just want an answer and don’t want to deal with the nonresponse and tumbleweeds from a totally new community. It is emotionally easier to toss a post about gaming into the void than it is to approach with an actual problem you have in a relationship or with your finances you need help with, then to check in daily in hope someone answered only to get crickets back, and then repost in another community (or even another site, where you might have to rewrite that post so that you can’t just look it up and find out FediverseUser83 posted the same thing as RedditUser92 and is thus probably the same person’s two accounts). So these become “why waste the effort and time when you could just go to Reddit and get a quicker response?” to an even higher level than other communities—nonresponse probably hurts more.

For relationship advice specifically, I recall that subreddit being called unrealistic so often that I understand why people might be wary to start a new one here.

I’m actually pretty image-conscious and a lot of this manifests in putting effort into how I dress. I am also incredibly uncomfortable putting pictures of myself (yes, you can talk about fashion without selfies, but the typical “does this look good on me” post requires you post yourself. “Look at this outfit I put together” is easiest to do with your own human body, not searching online for images of each piece of clothing you put on and putting them in one image, especially because some older pieces may not have a perfectly matching online image) on social media like Reddit, let alone the Fediverse which duplicates your post to tons of servers who may or may not respect post deletions. I’d imagine this frustrates the growth of fashion, makeup, and hair communities.