I don’t want to call anyone out individually. But I have come across accounts with 7-8k comments in the span of a few months. I don’t really think it’s worth reporting them, and don’t have the time or energy to research and block them individually, I’d just rather have them automatically muted on my end via a tool or plugin.
I assumed this would be something I’d have to program myself, just wasn’t sure if it was clearly not possible or practical for one reason or another.
It’s not obscure, but, for me, Wikipedia is the ultimate example of the old internet that still persists today.
Free to use, no account required, ad free, non-corporate, multilingual, heavily biased toward text, simple and utilitarian design. Hyperlinks concatenate relevant pieces of information, which serve as the means to navigate the site. The code is very simple (seriously, view the page source of a wikipiedia article). It’s based on the human desire to learn and share knowledge with others, and has remained resilient to corruption by commercial interests that pervert that desire for monetary gain. It’s a beautiful thing.
You’re right to point out the difficulty of preparing installation media.
Also, for the average person, friction will probably happen during installation - possibly having to circumvent safe boot to install and run a new OS (knowing how to enter the bios, feeling comfortable playing around in the bios, knowing how to even disable safe boot once you’re there, not exposing your device to security vulnerabilities by having safe boot disabled), the need for an existing understanding of how partitions work and how the partitions are structured on your specific device in order to test the waters with a dual boot setup on a drive that has data/functionality you want to preserve. Needing to know the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of swap, /home, and /root partitions. These points all came up on a recent installation, and I’m sure they would scare some people off.
Installation will be easy if you have the time, motivation, existing knowledge and/or bandwidth for a learning curve. But not everybody has that.
And that’s just installation, to say nothing of the actual use of the desktop environment, which is not as intuitive as its often claimed to be.
Thank you!