If I am outdoors in a sparse environment, I do not require myself to wear a mask, but should still try to keep a >6' distance between myself and others. If I am already wearing a mask, whether and when I take it off is up to comfort.
If I am indoors but alone in the room, a mask is recommended, as aerosols may still be lingering in the air; but if I figure enough time has passed, and masking is uncomfortable, I'll allow myself to take it off.
If I am outdoors in a crowd, or indoors with any number of people (with exemptions for a few specific people), I must wear a mask.

But when it comes to the "sparse" environment vs "crowd" rule... How many grains in a heap, right? I've tried looking into this myself, but the information I find is vague and contradictory, which leads me to feel conflicted in situations where it might be a heap but it's hard to determine.

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[–] AernaLingus@hexbear.net 7 points 1 week ago

I don't mask up outside when there's very few encounters (measured in minutes between encounters rather than encounters per minute) and I can just cross the street or take a wide berth to avoid contact (in my case, this boils down to car-dependent suburbs or off-season hiking trails) but I mask everywhere else. Even then, I think I might have caught something because I walked a little too close to a group of kids and then had a 24-hour bout of chills and aches a few days later (never tested positive for COVID, thankfully, and I haven't noticed any sequelae). If I'm going on a walk with someone outside of my bubble, I honestly just mask. At first I would do the distance thing, but then I would constantly be worrying about it, whereas if I mask I can just be present.
If it's not a space that I know a lot about in terms of occupancy, filtration, and ventilation, I'll always mask. When I have people outside of my bubble over at my place, I'll do the best I can in terms of opening windows, running the A/C fan continuously, and running air purifiers. Once they depart, I leave that all in place while masking for as long as I can bear. I don't have a very scientific way of handling it, but it's always measured in hours. If someone has a good resource for making more informed decisions about this I'd be very interested!
Not much to say about this one—pretty cut and dry.