They are. The Republican playbook in every state is to slash education funding, make abortion and birth control as hard to access as possible and then wait 20-30y for a big poorly educated population to grow that they can control easily with media and the Jesus
That depends. Are you doing this just for your own enjoyment or trying to use that art for commercial purposes? Do you have the artist's permission to modify and pass on their work?
If it's just for you then go hog wild. If you're planning to use the modified art commercially or post it online publicly you should get the artist's permission first.
Find widely known orgs that use the platform, the BBC comes to mind here. Search for other well known orgs to point out so you don't just have one example. Highlight the fact that other platforms are cross linking to the fediverse (Meta'a threads for example) so a fediverse presence will give the city a presence on those platforms with no extra effort needed. Point out that Twitter has become an unreliable platform due to ownership change and that that situation could replay itself at any time on any centralized platform. Help people get Mastodon working on phones if needed - the official app is quite good. Basically just sell the platform as best you can, don't go heavy on ideology and focus on practical benefits.
In my experience many of the people who haven't quit are self medicating for attention or depressive reasons. Of the folks I know who vape about half were diagnosed with ADHD later in life (30+) and quit after finding a stimulant medication that worked for them. The rest are unmedicated and self medicating with nicotine and coffee or energy drinks. Self medicating is overlooked in virtually every discussion about nicotine and I'd like to see it considered more often when the topic comes up instead of just leaping straight to "nicotine use bad" or "nicotine users should be punished" like most discussions do.
Edit: there's also some interesting research re: nicotine's neuroprotective properties that gets lost in the prohibition fervor
Offer to help setup the account and show them how to use Mastodon in general.
Also, not necessarily applicable to you but worth keeping in mind: encourage organizations to run Mastodon instances/provide Mastodon hosting for their employees or members in addition to providing email addresses. If an org is providing email to employees or members for business correspondence they could easily provide Mastodon services as well. This enables public discussion with the org in twitter/social media format without a third party controlling the platform.
Who could have possibly known? It's almost as if the <35 demographic showed up to every election every time then policies they support may become a priority. Who could have thunk it?
Write a couple of your own toy services as practice. Write a one-shot that fires at a particular time during boot, a normal service that would run a daemon and a mount service that fires after its dependencies are loaded (like, say, a bind mount that sets up a directory under /run/foo after the backing filesystem is mounted - I do this to make fast ext4 storage available in some parts of the VFS tree while using a btrfs filesystem for everything else.) You can also write file watcher services that fire after changes to a file or directory, I use one of those to mirror /boot/ to /.boot/ on another filesystem so it's captured by my system snapshots.
I'd start by reading the docs so you have some ideas about what services can do, then you'll find uses that you wouldn't have thought of before.
iPod replacement, dedicated smart home device dashboard, dedicated navigation/entertainment system in the car, dedicated UI for something on your home network or weather info or headlines or whatever website you want to check regularly in one place
This is the big one I want too. I'd love to curate topic based feeds from multiple communities so that other people could subscribe to a single coffee feed instead of 5-8 communities that they had to find themselves. I think this would be particularly useful for new people joining Lemmy, it would save a lot of time if they could just sub to a couple of multi's and start getting content they're interested in rather than needing to build their sub list entirely from scratch.
Every time I think the rubes couldn't possibly be stupider we have an election and I'm proved wrong