Then you know what to do, what to be clear about, and what topics to avoid. I wish you luck.

I would have taken the eye compliment as a yellow flag and appreciated it as a genuine compliment with no ulterior motives. I think the shoulder massage offer is where I’d draw the line and say, yes that’s clearly someone looking to escalate things physically with you rather quickly.

At least in my culture that would be seen as strange between acquaintances and still pretty strange between friends. I don’t think Japan is different in this regard so I would recommend clarifying your intentions sooner rather than later.

You originally brought up your virginity and your long term desires for sharing that with a long term partner. I would not bring that up with anyone you didn’t want to convince you out of that belief. That might not be anyone’s individual intention but that’s the worst case scenario so you should consider it. That means telling a best friend is probably great and would be recommended. Telling an acquaintance or a friend who is also sexually attracted to you - and therefore may not be the best councilor to you for purely your benefit - would probably be an unwise thing to do. Unless of course you want them to convince you out of that belief so that you can more casually have sex, which is fine as long as you’re being honest with yourself on who is really responsible for that change.

I’m not certain you provided any signs that he viewed it as a date or even that he liked you. I’m not sure you characterized any motivation on his part that made me think he was into you, except for that part of your conversation was around marriage and it read like you brought that up not him which I guess would be a signal that material was on their mind (but that’s irrelevant if you brought it up I’d say).

I generally assume all men want to sleep with all women regardless of any other concept or notion, simply because sex is fun and men in my experience seem on average far more willing to do that with just about anyone. That’s not really true, and it’s not really a fair assumption, but I don’t think it causes harm if you don’t act irrationally on it.

It sounds like he:

• likes talking to you because he invited you on two outings (both of which you assumed were dates)
• is rich and therefore when he pays for the food it lessens the implication that it’s a date (although I think that’s fair to keep in mind. To provide a counter example, I pay for friends meals semi-frequently and have always paid for every 1v1 meal with a woman (and most of the men 1v1s among peers or younger) as a thank you for the company. This is not attached to romantic or sexual expectations or desires, it’s just how I was raised and have decided to maintain that practice because I like it).
• is attractive (by your own admission)

I’m not certain I can gleam any more information about him out of your text.

Did he only want to talk to you about relationships and physicality? Was he physically distant or was he escalating touches? Did you catch him giving you signals like checking you out or anything else that might point to a purely carnal thinking?

Otherwise I’d say right now, it’s safe to assume he wants to have sex with you. It’s also probably unfair to assume that’s all he wants and doubly unfair to assume that that’s his motive for hanging out with you.

I believe men and women can have platonic relationships, which I think based on some comments you made in this thread you also believe.

So I’d recommend a couple possibilities:

• Your gut says he just wants to sleep with you, it’s heavy on your mind, or you just like being very communicative. In this case, communicate clearly and honestly something like “hey, just to get this off my chest I’m enjoying our conversations and 1v1s but as I explain to all men early on, I’m not interested in dating or anything physical right now. If that’s why you wanted to hangout, I understand and you’ve done nothing wrong, but that’s not why I was enjoying hanging out. If that’s not what you were looking for, and you’re okay with just being platonic friends, I can’t wait for our 1v1.”
• If you don’t think he was actually pursuing you, you feel like he was pretty normal hanging out with you, or you just don’t want to broach this subject until you’re certain you both have misaligned intentions I’d recommend continuing as normal, and mentally defining your boundaries while preparing to communicate them when you need to. This would look like (as a random kinda silly example) “he grabs your shoulder once while telling a story or something”, maybe no big deal for you and you move along, “he grabs your shoulder constantly and it’s now abnormal behavior”, you tell him you don’t like this and ask them to stop and then clarify your intentions with him (probably after that event/gathering).

Please know this is coming from a man’s perspective and it’s as brief as I could make it. Please consider the normal woman wisdom (even if it sucks that it’s required) that you should focus on your immediate physical safety first and emotional/mental safety next at all times. If you get the feeling that clear communication would put you in danger, don’t do it until you’re safe.

Sometimes I feel so new to setting up my own digital ecosystem because I look at a thing and think “that’s so cool” but struggle to imagine it at home. So could someone help me understand.

This would be a replacement for something like Google Drive or Proton Drive? The actions I would use this for would be:

• sending files to friends
• managing a collection of files like PDFs, music, ISO’s that could be accessible by my friends (or just my household)

So I would spin this up on my NAS or my main PC and replace those services and accomplish those actions using this software?

Are there other services or actions I’m missing? Am I misunderstanding the premise entirely?

I mean, I don’t know what actionable advice looks like if I’m being honest. I haven’t exactly connected the dots between wanting something political and achieving something political.

So I’d say that starting with raising awareness about root causes, building a community with an expectation of that awareness, and then manifesting meaningful action when an opportunity presents itself is likely as actionable as I can get. I think the benefit of doing this here on Lemmy is that it will make things more positive. We don’t have to have childish comments defending the rich and make the space more negative if we have a robust resource that explains the position. Maybe it’s short sighted of me, but a chunk of the negative articles and daily happenings can be chalked up to “rich people attempt distraction by talking about thing that doesn’t effect you or matter really much at all”. I think a community that posted those with a consistent title of “DISTRACTION - (news of the day)” would go a long way in allowing actual news to elevate itself. Because this is a root issue to a global problem, I think this awareness could effect nearly every community on Lemmy so why not talk about this more, educate yourself and your peers, and the more people who are up to speed the less time you have to spend talking about it and the more likely it gets fixed.

Idk, it’s not exactly “do X and get Y more positive posts” but it’s the kind of advice I think leads some percentage of people to start a union and then get parental leave and overtime protection. Like it’s not exactly sexy work, and it’s slow and not fun, but it’s the best I’ve got. I need to educate myself more on how to make actual political change in my local area (let alone online).

Are you claiming better living standards for everyone wouldn’t reduce people’s aggression, apathy, or lack of energy? I’m just trying to understand what your point is, because it seems immature putting it kindly.

People having money for good education, good healthcare, good public transit, time for community building, for hobbies, for art logically, obviously, and experimentally reduce trauma - crime - sadness. I mean you name it, money helps people in every statistic (up to a point). That seems fuckin obvious and not worth debating if someone disagreed.

All I did was append the notion that right now most people are losing purchasing power, losing quality of living, compared to just a few generations ago, because of wealth inequality. It’s why we can’t buy houses, it’s why there’s so much debt, it’s why we can’t seem to make effective change at the rate at which it’s needed. Tax the rich out of existence such that money remains in the hands of the working class and we’d all start to see improvements along every metric we care about.

If Lemmy seems negative, it’s because the world is in a negative zeitgeist right now due to the negative happenings. If one would want to make Lemmy positive, just like every where else in their life, they would need to address the root cause which I’m suggesting is wealth inequality.

I also further express that artificially creating a positive space on a site who’s purpose is Link aggregation seems less useful to me than one that keeps me informed about the various topics I like - including the positive and negative.

Tax the rich out of existence and watch how the quality of life goes up everywhere and everything starts being good again.

Idk, I think the fediverse is sufficiently positive. I also think society is going through a wealth inequality period common with most of history, and we’re either going to correct it or continue to suffer on a global scale. I don’t think I want to be a part of any aggregation site that isn’t tuned into the real world.

I was just getting this set up, this and the music one, because I want to leave Spotify. Hopefully an alternative solution shows up.