But how do you get the average user, for whom the cost of licensing the OS is completely opaque, to even think about cost at all? The computer they bought comes with Windows or MacOS on it already. Neither of which currently has any additional recurring monetary cost to the user.

You’d need mass-market laptops and desktops coming with a Linux distribution tuned well enough to run Microsoft Office and Adobe products without any more work for the user than running them on Windows. It needs to come pre installed and work so well at the “prosumer” use cases that they aren’t constantly thinking about how much easier it was to run Windows. Doing that means the OEM has to do much more unit testing and compatibility checks to ensure that when the customer opens the box and goes to install Steam and Apex or whatever that it just works without any terminal work necessary. Add to that that the OEM will want support from the company that manages the OS, and suddenly the cost to license tried and true Windows vs almost any Linux distribution for end user workstations is nearly moot.

And to make a dent in gaming, there is still an ocean to cross in terms of driver readiness and ease of use. It’s coming along, no doubt, and Valve investing as heavily as they are in Linux gaming is sure to move the needle, but it will still be an area of difficulty for some time because the user experience needs to accommodate completely custom builds with unexpected hardware configurations and box-built gaming PCs that can be OE tested and configured and everything in between.

This is fair. But at that point the same could be said of a Chromebook for her needs, which I’d venture is true for most people’s computing needs given entire swaths of the world do everything on a phone or tablet.

The Linux vs Windows debate is peculiar, because it really only applies to users who are more advanced than the average, arguing about problems that only arise when you want to do more demanding things with your machine like development and gaming. Your average user doesn’t care about any of the anti-monopolistic / FOSS reasons to use Linux, which makes the argument for them essentially “you should use this operating system that takes more work to use because it’s better for you for reasons you don’t care about.”

In order for Linux to become more mainstream, it needs to be able to exceed Windows’ performance and ease of use for gaming and productivity - which is challenging since when most users think of productivity apps, they only think of Microsoft products. It’s not enough to be equal in order to compel people to switch from what they’re accustomed to.

In fairness, it’s Wired who called them creatives, while Adobe called them artists.

This article is basically summed up: “VPNs don’t completely eliminate your digital footprint, so don’t use them unless you need to accomplish these specific things.”

It seems pretty disingenuous to discourage people from taking steps to protect their privacy in this way. It may not be sponsored, but it’s still bullshit.

And guns.

“Awkward spinning selector wheel”

Say what you want, but the iPod click wheel was anything but awkward. It was the most approachable and efficient interface and hardware on the market by miles and miles. Navigating other similar devices without it is an awful experience of buttons and layered menus that feel clunky and slow.

I won’t deny that the Arcos and other jukeboxes were incredible devices, but they lacked accessibility and mass appeal. Their size and expense kept most people from even considering getting one. They were absolutely an enthusiast’s device and nothing more.

The iPod ushered in the boom of portable media players and paved the road for Apple’s performance in the mobile phone space by establishing them as purveyors of a superior form factor and experience when it came to those devices. Apple owes its continued success in its personal computer and tablet product lines to the iPod’s design and their decision to focus on creating a cohesive ecosystem across their products based on those design principles.

I mean…. Really? Toyota kind of kicked off the whole EV shebang by introducing the first commercially successful hybrid in the Prius. And they’ve been innovating in the space ever since. Don’t mistake this for me believing they have a solid state battery right around the corner. But Japanese auto companies aren’t known for being on the forefront. They’re known for doing what everyone else does with better reliability and lower costs.

I don’t think that’s true. Unless it’s a server side server denial rather than defederation, all posts on Lemmy are public. This means Threads will directly receive updates even from defederated instances.

It’s blatantly wrong. Google extended XMPP for their own purposes and when participating with XMPP no longer suited them, they left. The collapse of the “XMPP userbase” is a misnomer - those users were never XMPP users. They were Google Chat users. When Google left, XMPP was in the same state it was in before Google got on board. It returned to its status as a niche protocol for a service that, as @effingjoe@kbin.social points out, people didn’t really want anymore.

Defederating is a one-way transaction. Any instance that defederates from Threads will only stop themselves from receiving data from it, but Threads will still be able to pull data directly from any and all instances.

That’s definitely a big part of it, too. I think the app symbolizes the chain of decisions that led us to where we are right now. We said, “We want to use the site how we have been using it for a long time” and they said, “Go fuck yourself.” So we did.

Not in a manner that doesn’t also discourage me from using the site, no. And clearly, if you check my post / comment history here you can see that I was being sarcastic. But only to a point - different people want different things, and a platform like Lemmy can provide for everyone. For users like me, I want all the content in the world without the algorithm mucking up the stream to prioritize sponsored content and advertisements. I want to be able to quickly pivot between memes, sports, gaming, music, news, and technology posts all on a single platform. Had Reddit not made that impossible with their poor decisions, I would not have migrated - nor would the majority of users currently on Lemmy. This is just classic NIMBYism, but hopefully it dies out and the fediverse continues to grow in popularity, with and without Threads.

Exactly. The only reason that Lemmy is seeing such a dramatic increase in user population and activity right now is because people are showing Reddit and Spez that they disagree with what they’re doing. Will it kill Reddit? Too early to tell if we’ll even make a dent. But it’s silly to say that most people are here because of some heartfelt desire to break free from the shackles of social media.

It’s funny pictures and jokes that I read while I’m pooping, my guy. It’s not that serious.

I’m in the same boat. I want Lemmy to be a firehose of content, the overwhelming majority of which I won’t ever want to interact with. I want that because different people are interested in different things, and that’s what allows for even the niche communities to find their footing with more than a small contingent of people.

I think the tools at our disposal as users and administrators of Fediverse systems are already good enough to manage and control your own experience, and I’m confident that they’ll continue to improve at a rapid click. The experience of using Lemmy as a Reddit replacement has already improved dramatically since June 12th, and it does so every day. I appreciate that others may feel much more strongly about the “dumbing down” of the overall content and community than I do, and for those folks joining an instance that outright defederates is a great option.

Folks are quick to tell people how they should be using Lemmy. “Don’t sign up for one of the big instances, you should use a small one instead because federation” is a big one - but there’s a lot of appeal in this model with being signed up to the instances generating the majority of the content the broader community is consuming because it makes finding that content easier than it otherwise would be. My hope is that the larger instances like lemmy.world will at least test the waters with Threads federation to see what it actually does to the community before taking the step of defederation, because right now those large instances are what’s feeding the rest of the rest of Lemmy.

As it stands, having those large instances federated with Threads and having smaller communities defederated seems like a best of both worlds scenario, because a small instance defederating with Threads won’t lose out on the other content being generated by those larger instances, but those who want to trudge through the mire of mass appeal can do so in one place.

… the PDP-11 😂

I think the barrier to entry also helps a bit. The folks willing to put up with the rough edges that Lemmy has are also likely willing to participate with the intent of making Lemmy a success rather than just “hangers on” as it were. With a 1600% growth in “active” user population, there are definitely a ton of lurkers, yet. Once it becomes more approachable, we’ll see if the community feeling that Lemmy has begins to tarnish and fade as the volume of interaction and content rises.