monkrus.ws idk how it works but it’s even easier than installing the legit way.

Yes, even for them, the information they can get through a phone is lifesaving. They can learn how to build water supply and sanitation systems and shelter. They can learn how to farm and forage for food. They can find the best way to cross international borders and become a refugee. And so on, they can improve every aspect of their lives. Information is power, and with a smartphone they have access to the entire world, rather than just word of mouth knowledge in their local community.

Obviously, places without any form of electricity are screwed, but satellite internet is rapidly becoming cheaper and more accessible so soon they won’t even need cell coverage.

2. Those in extreme poverty need access to more important things than access to these gadgets.

We’re going down a sidetrack here but this is just false. A smartphone these days is a ticket to many things required to live. Applying for jobs, applying for government services, buying essential items cheaply, cheap/free education.

Third party servers aren’t always enough. Microsoft managed to ruin 3rd party Minecraft servers.

I liked Quora as recently as a few years ago, it had some nice explanations that you couldn’t get anywhere else. Obviously you have to take everything with a grain of salt, but you have to do that anywhere on the internet.

I haven’t had any issues with Nextcloud yet. But any torrent client refuses to work. I’ve tried various qbittorrent containers, transmission, deluge briefly, they all work for a while but eventual refuse to do anything.

OSMand tends to choose a much more intuitive route.

The same thing is true here. A novice shouldn’t be hosting their own instance, heck a experienced user shouldn’t host their own instance unless they want a hobby.

Because it matters to the end user that all the instances are cross compatible, that’s the federated part. When I first heard of Lemmy and Mastadon as “self hosted social media”, I assumed that all the instances were isolated, and dismissed it as pointless. Once I learned what federation was, possibly through the email analogy, I was instantly onboard.

We’re not at a stage where you can make full use of these platforms without having a basic understanding of how they work. A disinterested idiot is going to go " WTF is an instance, why is [whatever instance they landed on] so empty" and give up. The email analogy is useful for the interested skeptic and they’re the people that are most likely to stick around.

In this thread the email analogy has been criticized for being not technically accurate enough and too technically accurate. That suggests it’s about right.

Maybe I’m optimistic here, but I feel like most users of email and Facebook understand that you can send email from Gmail to Outlook and that those are different services, but you can’t send a Facebook(message? story? idk I don’t use Facebook) to a Twitter user.

I can’t think of a better way to explain that activitypub is an open and cross-compatible protocol. The only other big cross-compatible protocol is the web(HTML etc), but that’s hopeless, half of people don’t seem to understand what a browser is.

Email is the only federated social platform that every normal person is familiar with. It doesn’t matter that the technical specifications are completely different. The metaphor goes as far as “in the fediverse anyone signed up with any instance can communicate with anyone on any other instance, like email”. For that purpose, it’s a good metaphor.

They weren’t gaining anything with the free service, now they might get a bit of money from it.

5 year olds are pretty cringe

Their aggressive, misleading and clickbait ads, particularly as YouTube sponsorships. From my experience the product is fine, but the ads make it seem like their covering up for something.

Podcasts are just a RSS feed with an mp3 downloas link. It’s trivial to open the RSS feed in your browser and locate the mp3 download link. Download the mp3, open it in any audio editor, edit out the ad. Or find the folder where your podcast app stores the mp3s and edit them from there.

Personally, I’m OK with podcast ads as there’s limited opportunity for tracking or personalization. If we don’t encorage podcasts to remain as an open platform, they will be swallowed up by Spotify.

If it’s faster to get an AI to write your commit messages than to write them yourself, your commit messages are too long. They should be one sentence.

Star Wars despecialized edition.

In 1997 George Lucas updated the original trilogy with new special effects, and every release since then has been the new special edition.

Fans have gone through a painstaking archival effort to track down the “despecialized” original release in as high quality as possible.

It gets better. Their Instagram is canadapetcareusa