The email analogy just goes so far, because of mental models.

Yeah, those of us who have opinions on sudo vs doas will get it. Email is a protocol standard that allows different servers to exchange compatible data. Most people don’t conceptualize it like that; they conceptualize it like the postal service. The USPS, Royal Mail and others are one entity that most end users just handwave away as “in the mail” and their only concern is where do I go to send and receive my mail? Your mailbox is at the post office on the corner of Road st. and Boulevard ave. Your email inbox is at gmail.com. Gmail, or hotmail, or whatever, is your local post office for putting things “in the mail.”

Nobody conceptualizes social media like that. Social media is a place you go to be among other people. Back in my day we called them “Sites.” Myspace and Facebook were “sites.” Places you went. Now they call them “apps” but they’re still conceptualized as where the people participating in this culture are. Get it through the average Tiktokker’s head that you get the Loops app, and then you have to pick a server to connect that app to. “Just get me to Loops.”

Some servers are full, some you have to apply for, some are perfectly open to join. They all connect to each other, except they can choose not to, and choosing not to connect to each other is why some servers exist in the first place. We’re going to present you with a list of instances to join, you’ll be presented with the instance’s logo, which half of them left blank so you get a boilerplate image, a blue checkmark on every single one which carries no meaning it just looks social media-y, and the top sentence and a half of a description which is either default text or a description of the platform as a whole because it wasn’t explained to the instance admins what this description field was for.

So, new user who probably still isn’t sure how this works, make a decision about something that feels kind of abstract that we’ve done a really bad job of explaining.

What’s my username?

Boy I don’t need the childrape administration to declassify extraterrestrial UFO documents when I can talk to space aliens right here on Lemmy. That’s not how email works and if you were a placental mammal you’d know that.

You don’t go to email.org, click Join and arrive on a page that says “Thank you for your interest in Email: the open, federated, ethical, cage-free non-instant text messaging standard of the web! To continue, select one of these 44 providers based on a badly rendered logo and three almost identical bullet points. Don’t worry, the decision doesn’t matter…well it kinda does, for reasons that aren’t going to be explained to you up front, so pick one at random, get the lay of the land, then come back and join for real.”

No, the majority of people ended up with an email account while signing up for another service, such as gmail accounts for Android users or icloud accounts for iPhone users. You probably have an outlook account if you use Windows (or if you’re a certain age, a hotmail account). If you’re a dad, you have an email account from your ISP, or you got one from work or school. If you sought out something beyond that, like Protonmail or hosting on your own domain, you started looking for a provider with some shopping criteria in mind.

As both a Cinnamon and KDE user, you can tell you’re using an app made for Gnome because it either outright doesn’t do anything, or it does the barest least nuanced most stereotypical version of that thing. Oh great, another empty fuckpuke window that doesn’t respect the system theme with an empty hamburger menu and one button in the very top-left that says “Do Something”.

I don’t know of a package manager with a GTK filter.

Then you tilt the camera up and there are these big fuckoff pyramids just like, right over there.

There’s this pop culture idea that the pyramids are far out in an inhospitable desert, like three days by camel or something, nah they’re just in the suburbs.

If you have a second device, like an old laptop or something, that you can put Linux on to use it for stuff, I’d suggest that.

The short story of my Linux conversion was I got a Raspberry Pi for my amateur radio hobby. Learning how to deal with Linux as a side thing that had no pressure of “I might need my computer for something” really helped take to it.

hamsters do be packing.

I use metric all the time in the US. My 3D printer runs in millimeters and Celsius, I buy Pepsi by the liter, I dose every medicine by the gram, I meter electricity by the kilowatt and my lights are rated in lumens.

What I don’t do is this weird sense of superiority found in cultivated ignorance the Europeans seem so fond of on the subject.

No, dumping ice cream on the cat isn’t worth it. It’s funny for a few minutes but then you have to clean it up and cats hold grudges.

This is the internet, so obviously it means handjob.

When aren’t students treated like guinea pigs? Hank Green once pointed out that most science done on “people” were actually done on mostly white, mostly American, mostly young, mostly male college students, because that’s who signs up for “studies.”

Do the French still have a death penalty? If no, pass.

Curious how the French have jurisdiction over Austin?

I’ve gone on this tirade plenty of times, but inches aren’t stupid. 12 inches to a foot makes a lot of sense for problems we’ve had to solve for millennia, because it’s 3 times a power of two. For things like woodoworking it actually makes more sense than the metric system.

“But 10 deciliters in a liter” Using a tape measure, mark out 1/3rd of the thickness of a standard 19mm sheet of plywood. I’ll be over here doing the same with 3/4" plywood by marking at 1/4".

Maybe we shouldn’t be selling Europe any weapons that work.

*sk8r boi

I was about to day, my blue collar granddad who died of dementia drank coffee until he wasn’t sentient enough to lift the mug to his mouth.

No Duh?!

Okay, he was 6’5" and she was 5’2".

It is my understanding that pull requests say “Hey, I forked and modified your project. Look at it and consider adopting my changes in your project.” So anyone who wants to look at the “experimental stuff” can just pull that fork. Someone in charge of the main branch decides if and when to merge pull requests.

The problem becomes the volume of requests; they’re kinda getting DDOS’d.

They don’t seem to be aware they’re delicious with barbecue sauce.