Happy birthday, Tildes! Thanks again to @Deimos for making the best little link aggregator community on the net, and keeping it running so well. And thanks to all you lovely people for all your worthwhile contributions here too. :)

Hi, everyone. I'm on the hunt for opinions. I live in a colder climate in North America with no access to natural gas. Most heat their homes with propane or oil. Mine uses a very old 30+ year old oil boiler. I've started to see more pellet boilers, but I'm a bit uncertain about them at the moment. I don't like burning fossil fuels to heat my home, but electric isn't really an option out here and it's hard to argue with the "tried and true" cast iron boiler with the BTU per gallon oil offers. On the other hand, my local government is practically throwing money and/or attractive financing at people to switch.

I'm curious if anyone out there has made the switch to some kind of pellet-fed heating system from a fossil fuel system. If so, I'd love to hear what you think of them, be it good or bad.

I've spoken with some authors who are working on non-fiction books. I've noticed that some of them know their books intimately and can correct me if I mis-relay a section back to them that I've read. They can do this without checking the actual book and I've then verified that I was incorrect.

Others have told me that by the time they were finished a seemingly infinite number of edits, they can't bear to read their own book again and just sent it to an editor at that point and released it.

I was surprised by the latter but it does remind me of my own experience writing very long papers in college. Is this common in your own experience?

I'm taking some time to set up a mastodon account, and am currently confused about how following other federated accounts is supposed to work.

Let's use https://lemmy.world/c/comicstrips as an example. I go to that link and I see posts from other federated sites, as well as posts made directly on lemmy.world (I presume). I can also view all posts from that community in r.nf as well (https://r.nf/c/comicstrips@lemmy.world). I see all the same posts from the lemmy link.

What I don't understand is why, when I follow @comicstrips@lemmy.world on mastodon I only ever am shown replies and boosts from the account. I don't see the original image post, which I was expecting.

What am I missing? For what it's worth I'm using Phanpy to interact with mastodon, but am experiencing the same behavior on mastodon.social as well.

The foundation for organic friendships they say is repeated, unplanned interactions (which I think I largely agree with). But this isn't always feasible, depending on the environment you're in. Do you think a truly rich and organic friendship can be "forced"? What, if anything, is lost?

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like net neutrality, agreements.noncompete and tiktok. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was a nosey parker.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?