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Comment on Lemmy is a tech literate echo chamber

lucullus@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

You severly overestimate the average persons tech literacy even when you try to correct for it. Booting from USB is already a really advanced topic.

Though creating a lemmy account is not that complex. Typically all you have to do is fill out a form on the websiten instructions included. The problem there is not the tech literacyn but the willingness of the people to even interact with systems they don’t know, like finding a home instance or understanding the concept of the fediverse. Most people could create a lemmy account, though also most people wouldn’t.

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ConstableJelly@midwest.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

Though creating a lemmy account is not that complex. Typically all you have to do is fill out a form on the websiten instructions included. The problem there is not the tech literacyn but the willingness of the people to even interact with systems they don’t know, like finding a home instance or understanding the concept of the fediverse. Most people could create a lemmy account, though also most people wouldn’t.

Spot on, it feels complicated because they don’t understand what’s being asked. I’ve said this before previously, but most people have no concept of frontends and backends. For most people, Twitter is just something that’s on their phone, and it uses the internet to see what other people have in their Twitter apps on their phones.

Because internet usage and software generally is like 99.999% commercial, even the idea of closed and open source probably doesn’t make sense to a lot of people. “Check out Mastodon, it’s like Twitter but anyone can host it” would mean nothing to the average user. I’m on the absolute lower end of tech literacy in this community, so it’s constantly apparent how much my Lemmy friends overestimate the general population.

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squaresinger@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Tbh, getting into lemmy is quite a bit more complex than e.g. into Instagram or other centralized social media platforms.

Compare this:

Choose which social media platform to use and land on Instagram

Download the instagram app from the default store of your phone’s OS

Create an account

Done

with:

Choose which social media platform to use and land on Lemmy

Choose which app to use. There’s like 20 of them, some great some not so, some active, some abandoned. There’s no guide or anything, so you’ll have to google and/or try 5 of them to find one you like.

Choose which instance to use. There are literally hundreds of them and you don’t even know where to start. You have no information, but this choice is central to the kind of lemmy experience you will get.

Google and find join-lemmy.org. Now you got a one-liner for each instance together with user count. So naively you sort by activity and land on lemmy.ml.

Create an account

Figure out what .ml stands for.

Repeat step 3-5 because account transfers between instances don’t work.

Repeat step 3-5 because you landed on the likes of lemmy.ee or feddit.de, and the instance closed down

Done, until your instance closes down

Slight hyperbole here, but choosing an app and instance alone is complicated enough to scare away lots of people.
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- Por_que_pine@startrek.website ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Hyperbole? Not really. You described my lemmy experience perfectly. However, not having big data sift through my digital feces to find the peanut, makes it worth the effort.
  
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  - squaresinger@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Tbh, not even that is guaranteed. Lemmy (or the fediverse in general) are really not that privacy-focussed at all.
    
    While the people running your instance might not be sifting through your data, nothing would stop anyone from doing so. Everything you post on Lemmy is public, and even if all major instances would somehow block scraping (which they don’t), a scraper would only need to create their own instance and ActivityPub would just deliver all of the data in a nice and easy to process way.
    
    The big advantage of Lemmy is that it is not controlled by one large corporation (and instead by a bunch of faceless, unknown randos on the internet), not that posting stuff publically visible on the internet is somehow more private.
    
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YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
There’s a comment above this who incredulously exclaims “boot from a USB drive‽” and I can tell you as someone who does tech support, that may be legitimately 1% of the US population.

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- LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  You’re trying to boot from legacy boot media.
  
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  - YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    5 & 1/4 goes brtrtrtrt
    
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- anton@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Does it count if I have to google which key to hold down to enter the boot menu or bios every time? There are 12 function keys and esc.
  
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  - Pumasuedeblue@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    That still counts. I have 25 years in IT and I’m still surprised by every new machine. F2? Why?
    
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    YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Fucking real! F10&f12 ftw. it can’t be that hard to enforce a simple standard! HDMI is a good example of this.
    
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  - samus12345@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Yeah, I’m pretty sure I could do it, but I would need to look up the steps. Already knowing how to do tech stuff is one thing, but below that are people like me that are comfortable following guides. It seems a lot of people aren’t.
    
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    Gloomy@mander.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    This is where i sit. I know shit on my own, but i know how to look it up. I managed to do the transfer from Windows Linux Mint and have been able to navigate the bumps in the process via Google and trying to get a halfway decent idea about some very basic concepts. Now i am moving on and am trying to get rid of all Tech Companies that bend their knee to fascism. And that works as well, without being a tech savvy person.
    
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  - YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Yes. You are part of the one percent.
    
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bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
People are lazier than ever now. Thats one reason I dont like the tech illiterate normies. Its SO EASY so learn how to use the tools you interact with 24/7. But they are lazy.

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CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Ok booting from USB can’t be that advanced is it? I mean you just plug the thing in then mash F2 on startup, select the USB from the boot menu which is no more complex than browsing a picture folder and hit save and start.

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- ArsonButCute@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Hon’ some people don’t know you can align the USB by checking if the holes on the outside are filled or not and have to deal with the unraveling the USB superposition dance.
  
  Getting a USB in on the first try is considered wizardry by average person. Booting from one? May as well be Zeus with command of electrons like that.
  
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  - Cracks_InTheWalls@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    
    some people don’t know you can align the USB by checking if the holes on the outside are filled or not
    
    This one statement has me questioning a large swath of my life to date. Booting from the (eventually) correctly aligned USB has always been the easy part.
    
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  - CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    I thought the USB superposition was just a meme… I need to go lay down, maybe get a rum n’ coke.
    
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