Just joined. Also, transitioning away from Reddit. From Pittsburgh (hence yinzer in my user name), then DC area for @ a decade, & last 2 decades in a state run by folks who think the Desantis nuttery is worth emulating. Lefty, divorced dad of 2, who I'm glad inherited the don't sit by quietly but stand up against bullies from their parents.

Nature is my go-to self-care & main hobbies. Nature photography & hiking, nature documentaries, learning about the regions native flora, fauna, geology, & environmental degradation, etc.

Howdy. New user from the Chicago suburbs. Mostly lurked on reddit because it felt too big to get meaningfully involved. This seems like a nice change of pace.

Look forward to getting to know you all.

Reddit (and formerly Digg) refugee from Northeast Indiana.

I am a leftist and an atheist. My hobbies include tech, pc gaming, rock/electronic music (consuming), programming, and recently collecting oldschool smartwatches. I also love cats.

Lemmy.world was having some technical issues, so I decided to make the move to midwest.social. I'm really liking it here so far. What I like most about Lemmy is actually being able to have conversations, rather than having my comments get buried in thousands of other comments.

Are folks from other instances welcome here? Still figuring out etiquette or whatever. I got impatient over the weekend and jumped into Lemmy through sopuli.xyz due to a lower barrier to entry.

I'm a Minnesota person living in St. Paul. I coordinate graduate programs, which basically means I'm a nanny for graduate students. Movie nerd and sweet tooth haver. 1 dog and 3 cats. I used to be a forklift operator and a freight railroad conductor. Formerly UFCW, BLET, and AFSCME. Now I'm IWW IU620.

Hello everyone! Yet another Reddit Refugee, here. I'm a network engineer and DIYer with a passion for calculators, fountain pens, and mechanical pencils. Been on Red Matrix/Hubzilla for years, and I'm looking forward to seeing what this part of the Fediverse is like!

Checking in from Kansas!

Hi there! I'm from Colorado, which is almost the midwest! I saw the community and decided to pop into Lemmy through here, though, since it seemed to be friendly and welcoming. I write queer fantasy romance and love a good book!

Hello! Grew up in the Chicago area, and now lived most of my adult life in the Detroit area. I've been mostly lurking on Mastodon for several years now, but somehow didn't know Lemmy existed until the Reddit meltdown. Really glad to be here.

Here's my "me too" post.

Reddit refugee fleeing the third party app bullshit. I'm in IT, HPC to be more specific, at a well-known university in the Midwest. I play lots of video games, and by lots I mean mostly Terraria.

South Central Nebraska here, born and raised! I love living and working out here in rural Nebraska. I'm an Electrical Engineer by trade and an Open Source/Linux Enthusiast for fun! I was glad to see there's some other stuff like a woodworking community here also! Looking forward to a replacement for the centralized social medias. I'm already on Mastodon and Pixelfed, so this should be a nice addition for me.

Hi, former Wisconsinite in exile, trying to move back.

Hello! My name is Klumpmeister! I am a 30 year old IT synth nerd who plays guitar and retro games. I currently live in Columbus, OH. Formerly, Bloomington, IN. I loved twitter and reddit and both of them have imploded. I loved Tweetbot and Apollo specifically. Once tweetbot was gone I knew Apollo would be next.

I am happy to see midwest.social and lemmy embrace the fediverse while trying to take on the format of reddit. I would love to see what kind of things lemmy can offer in the topics I liked about reddit. Synths, video games, local topics / discussions.

I am on mastodon as well: @Klumpmeister@mstdn.games

Former Reddit user who is jumping ship after 13 years, I live in the Twin Cities I’ve been in IT for more than 10 years trying to jump ship to programming interest our programming fanfiction litRPG‘s and audiobooks not necessarily in that order.

David-Ray here. I live on the western edge of the Ozark highlands. Would like to see a server even more localized to my area. Guess I'll have learn how to run one.

Hi! Just joined because of the BS happening over at Reddit right now (RIP Apollo 😞). I've enjoyed my experiences on my friend's Mastodon instance and figured a Reddit-adjacent service on the Fediverse could be fun too. Librarian and researcher from Michigan, into social computing/inclusive design, hiking in the woods, collections development, Melee, Dwarf Fortress, etc. Nice to meet you all 👋

Hi. I'm looking for weird shit in the Internet. I decided to hop on Midwest.social to ease the burden in Lemmy.ml

Hey all, small town Illinoisan here. I've been in IT for over a decade, but I'm trying to transition to pretty much anything else at this point.

I'm also a game developer, solo in my free time. Anybody know of any good gamedev communities here?

Greetings, all. Former Game Developer, located in the Metro Detroit area, looking for an alternative to Reddit. Presently in an offshoot of the game business, doing simulations work with game engines, but nothing real fun and interesting, and mostly can't-talk-about stuff.

Also have done some maybe interesting work in online resale.

Huge Star Trek nerd right now, mid Superhero pop culture nerd, fan of 80's-00's alt/rock/metal.

This makes me wonder if this site has a spot for user profiles, and stuff like that. Always interesting to try out new things, and so far, this doesn't turn me off... although I could wish for some adjustments to the UI. If I get particularly vexed by something, but I still like it, I might dig into developing something :)

Are you there, fellas? It's me, Bizzle.

Lemmy.world wasn't working for me so I jumped ship over here.

Morning everyone. Chicago suburb native of 42 years who doesn't really feel like leaving. Working at one of the many data centers in the Chicago area, if you can call it work, because I enjoy technology in general. I joined because I've been migrating from legacy social media to the Fediverse; Reddit's API nonsense helped that process along.

Contrary to what my parents and sisters drilled into my head as I was growing up, I've been leaning more and more left as I age. At some point, someone decided that giving our children a better life meant making them suffer. Seems like teaching my kids to be grateful for the opportunities they have, respect others' beliefs, accept people from all walks of life, stand up for marginalized groups, foster positive mental health outcomes, not expect anything to be handed to them, and just be good people in general makes me a communist in the eyes of many, including my own parents. I'm gonna have to pass on whatever ideology came up with that and work toward dismantling it.

Beyond that ... I'm pretty low key most of the time. I like PC (Linux) gaming, physical computing, 3D printing, video editing, analog media preservation, listening to open source-related podcasts, road trips, dogs, glamping, grilling, beer, grilling while glamping and drinking beer and hanging out with my dogs, etc. I listen to metal but have been on a Sleep Token kick since the newest album was released.

I don't speak up often because someone else typically said what I want to say first, posting responses like "This" is annoying, and upvotes are silent. At any rate, nice to meet everyone, hope to be able to contribute something useful at some point.

Hiya, all! I'm originally from IL and am now bouncing around the Upper Midwest a bit. I'm interested in a little bit of (almost) everything. I'm another person moving over to a Fediverse alternative to Reddit. I was an early adopter of Mastodon, which has been my main social media presence for some time.

This is a reposting from post-data loss:

I grew up in southeast Iowa (Davenport) and live there currently. I studied history (American Colonial Frontier era Indigenous Material Culture) and chemistry (physically) at Wartburg College, and went on to get a Master’s degree in museum studies from Western Illinois University. I always have loved history and the way we share stories of the past.

I am currently working as an independent museum consultant in southeast Iowa, wherein I hop around to small and micro museums to advise them on collections care, curation, education, and marketing. Most of these museums have one or two part time staff members or are all volunteer based. I come in to lend (a reasonably priced) hand with whatever may be holding that museum or historic home from being its best.

My master’s thesis was concerned with use of a Post-Human methodology in combination with New Materialism to provide new perspectives on objects housed in a museum collection. I really tried my advisor’s patience at times with this topic. I now use this approach in my research and work every day.

Outside of this, I am an avid head-fi enthusiast, I play the viola in the local symphony, I’m Lutheran, and I am linux and freeBSD tinkerer. I came to Lemmy following the loss of Apollo and have now really committed to federated social media. I look forward to connecting with some of you in due time!