I don't know anything about gardening but I have a small patch of gravel out front where I like to keep some potted plants. My acer's leaves came back healthy after winter but as you can see it isn't doing too good now. I thought the crispy leaves might be because I let it dry out (I was ill for a couple weeks when we had some dry, sunny weather), but looking at the base I noticed this white stuff: https://i.imgur.com/2qc87P3.jpeg, not sure if it's scale or something else? Any ideas what I can do? I see a fair number of tiny bugs and ants in the soil but I'm not sure what's normal. I'm located in the UK, if that matters.

i think it really captures the cultural zeitgeist

I've seen a lot of comments suggesting Threads should be pre-emptively defederated by Lemmy/kbin instances if it tries to join us. I'm a bit confused what the problem would be. When Meta does its usual corporate bullshit over at Threads, how would that hurt a user or community based on Lemmy.world? If anything, wouldn't it give the fediverse a boost if Threads users start discovering communities outside of Meta's control?

I presume I'm missing something, as you can probably tell I don't fully understand how Lemmy, Threads or federation all work.

feel free to use. It would be good to get more people in here.. ^and^ ^hopefully^ ^some^ ^better^ ^artists^^（´＠＿＠｀）^

I always love watching people discovering my favorite games for the first time. My favorite blind playthrough is probably Dan Floyd's "bug knight" series on Playframe, and more recently I've enjoyed watching Adamanth and lil Indigestion. Who do you like watching?