After reading a bunch of comments about people using electronics in this post, I had initially pictured “jumpers” as either “jumper cables”, the things people use to boost car batteries with, or small plastic coated pieces of metal or wires that can be placed over exposed pins on circuit boards to connect them (e.g to enable some behaviour). Generally I’d only assume this meaning in a discussion about electronics, though.

(I’m not the person that you replied to, and I knew that jumper means sweater or jacket or something in British (and possibly Australian?) English.)

And now that I think about it, most of my clothing gets worn after a few years, at least on the elbows.

I like how Mastodon lets you post links to things like your personal website or GitHub, and show a “verified” check next to them if you add something to your site/github to indicate that you’re the owner.

I don’t really use Bluesky but I like how they let you use your domain name as a username.

It probably rules out bots but I assume propaganda/troll farms could still do this.

Another thing I was thinking of is if there could be separate moderation lists that people could subscribe to. Maybe one basic one for “obviously spam”, but others for people who are suspected of being bots. I’m sure there would be abuse and echo chambers, but if anyone can create and many people can contribute to a list, people could just go with whatever list they prefer, perhaps looking at the blocked content itself to see if the list is implemented well.

I think some people used Reddit enhancement suite to tag users that they interact with. I like that idea but have never gone to the effort, and don’t usually read usernames enough to remember people. So a crowdsourced version of that might work.

If this is it then OP should just offer to get coffee to-go and go for a walk or sit in a nearby park, perhaps with a playground. Then they wouldn’t have to worry about bothering others. A coffee shop seems like a boring place for a 3 year old.

My assumption is that there is a chance (not sure how large) that kids could be restless and need constant attention, and then it would suck for OP and is a bit much to expect someone you barely know to meet up just for that.

But I think there’s a chance that the young one will just sleep, and the older one could occupy themselves at the playground or even with a tablet or something. Then it should only be a minor hassle for the OP.

Maybe OP could just ask the person if they think they’ll be able to actually talk or if the kids will need constant attention.