I recall beehaw having some good communities when I was first on Lemmy this summer, but I haven’t seen much from there on Kbin or the lemmies I use - presumably because beehaw defederated for whatever reason. If you’re not going to be connected to the largest instances anyway, what’s the difference?
Sure, having a standalone forum is a legitimate thing to do, like it always has been since the start of the internet. Seems like it would be harder to grow the site without the network effect of the rest of Lemmy though.
The experience was torturous overall, but considering it’s basically time travel and I’d know everything about the future up to 2024, I think I’d do a lot better at everything a second time around. I’d be amazingly good at BASIC and Pascal when I was 7, and would definitely buy that Amiga C compiler this time. I’d be pretty bored with all the 8 and 16 but Sega games since I already played them but I’d also get an SNES, since I missed all that last time. School would be easy af, and i’d feel like a pervert dating middle and high school girls so might as well just test out and get a PhD when I was 12 or something.
Oh, the real question. What would I rather I did differently? I should have spent less time reading my own books and playing video games at home, and focused on the studies school wanted me to do so I could test out and just start taking university courses rather than stay in the slog of middle and high school. Socially it was awful and not sure what I could have done at the time. I ended up dropping out and getting a GED after 9th grade, and did great on the ACT, could have gotten scholarships, but decided to do self employment rather than go to college, which wasn’t a great plan overall due to the specifics of what I chose and what happened.