Zero. It seems like software is increasingly expecting to be deployed in a container though, so that probably won’t last forever.

I don’t know where you live, but it is not normal for prospective employers to ask for your medical history most places, and is legally questionable if not outright banned under the anti-discrimination laws of many countries.

Linux is a kernel which is often bundled with proprietary components. Android, for example uses the Linux kernel. The whole desktop operating system you seem to be thinking of is a Linux distribution.

There have been many Linux distributions with proprietary components over the years. SUSE’s YaST configuration tool used to be proprietary, for example. There’s probably something current along the same lines, but there’s not much demand for semi-proprietary desktop Linux.

Yes. I’d rather not be, but most people I know in person use it, and do not regularly view or share content using anything else in a one-to-many format.

What I won’t do is install any of their mobile apps or regularly use their chat. When people try that, I reply hours later using something else.

Does it count if I already know whiskey is bad for me?

Can you think of anything that happened in the past month or so, perhaps involving US politics, that might have a tendency to radicalize people?

Not any more than any other subsidy is.

Actually nullifying a debt a borrower owes to a lender, which the government guaranteed would be paid at the time the loan was issued would be akin to theft. As far as I know, all programs that “cancel” student loan debt are actually the government paying the balance to the issuer.

I run Linux on a Thinkpad P14S III with a Ryzen 6850u. It has been a trouble-free experience, and if there’s any way in which it is not optimized, it masks that by being very fast.

Not using a derivative of Scheme as originally planned was a mistake.

The difference I’ve noticed is that average people memorize how to accomplish their tasks with software and savvy people look for something that will accomplish their task.

1. People install communication apps because someone they want to communicate asks/tells them to. I don’t want to use Slack, but people who pay my bills use Slack, so I use Slack. I use Matrix too because I believe in it philosophically, but the UX is a little rough and very few conversations I want to have are actually taking place there.
2. I don’t really understand this one. Adblockers are relatively easy to install and the modern web sucks without them.
3. I haven’t encountered much of this in a long time, but familiar feels safe to people. Something they haven’t heard of might feel sketchy.
4. This sounds like someone trying to persuade you to install an app because you using it would be convenient for them.

A person is smart. People, not so much.

I’ve been using Maddy for about a year. It’s easy to set up and has been trouble free.

It’s quite resistant to any single entity’s censorship, but if you share things most server admins consider unacceptable, other servers will block your server.

lemmy.ml… copy a sentence from the link provided which links to some article called “The Principles of Communism”

At least one of the Lemmy developers is a hardcore communist, and some people see lemmy.ml as a little sketchy for that reason. I see you found another server, which is exactly how federation is meant to work. While the overall culture tends to be left-leaning, most server admins are not hardcore communists and don’t censor political positions that aren’t advocating violence or discrimination.

I don’t think many people have read RFC 5322 (I haven’t), but most non-technical people I know understand these things about email:

• There are different service providers, and people can email each other no matter which provider they use
• There are different email apps
• Some apps are tied to specific service providers and others are not

I do lament the overall level of tech literacy.

The average person understands email pretty well. Mastodon doesn’t require much more understanding than that, but could probably use some UX and messaging work.

That’s a bit of a circular reference: “it got popular because it got popular”. The question remains: why did BlueSky reach that threshold and Mastodon did not?

I’m inclined to agree that’s a problem. Everyone’s first encounter with a social media content recommendation algorithm was one designed to manipulate them into clicking ads, so it caused some backlash. Recommendation algorithms can be tuned to show things people care about and want to engage with.

It seems to me software designed to facilitate discussion shouldn’t have a downvote buttton. There should be a UI for marking comments as inappropriate, but it should require a second step saying why. Perhaps one of the reasons should even be “I disagree”, but that option should have no effect.

It’s not impossible to abuse of course, but it nudges people in the right direction. Those UI nudges can be pretty effective.

Zero.

I mainly look at my subscribed feed, which contains mostly topics I want to see in communities moderated well enough I rarely see anybody being horrible.