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.

The same could be said for K-9. What more could you want from an email app.

Yes, exactly, you get it! I don’t like paying for things, you don’t like paying for things. Paying for things sucks. We need post scarcity communism.

The last paid Mac OS update was Mountain Lion in 2012. Wasn’t the last paid Windows update Windows 7 in 2009, since it’s technically possible to update all the way to Windows 11 without buying another license.

Corporate welfare is a problem in all capitalist countries

Paracetamol is not considered an anti-inflammatory.

Why would there be load on the clutch if the handbrake is on?

True, but low rez web jpegs is a huge part of the market for images. AI will replace stock photos and that’s incredibly disruptive on it’s own.

It’s not uncommon to speed, drink drive, etc, that doesn’t mean those things are right. There’s all sorts of obstacles that might end up on a regular road that you should be able to stop for. Fallen rocks, fallen trees, pedestrians, cyclists, parked cars, traffic tailbacks.

And remember, the bridge did have warnings, which happened to be removed by vandals. That’s not the city’s fault.

That’s always been the way with Apple. If you fit into the 0.1% of users that can make use of their products, it’s good value. If you don’t, it’s bad value and so locked down there’s nothing you can do about it. Most people don’t need what Apple is offering, yet buy it anyway. That’s the part I don’t get.

Absolutely those things are different. But the point of a search engine is to, crudely and algorithmically, sort out both.

Every (for profit)company is a monetization company. That’s the definition of a company.

Block it then. Don’t waste your attention on posts that don’t bring you joy.

I agree in this case.

But there’s a narrative that software needs regular updates or it’s worthless, but some things are just done and stable.

If it’s feature complete, a keyboard doesn’t need regular updates. According to the other thread it’s not feature complete, so it could be abandoned. Since it’s FOSS any enthusiastic person could stop it from being abandoned.

A program is written in source code. However in order for that source code to run on your device, it has to be “complied” into a “binary”. Open source apps mean that the source code is avalible, however someone still has to do the compiling. Fdroid does the compiling themselves, which means they can guarantee that the binary in their repository came from the source code, aka it is reproducible from the source code. Izzy gets the developer to compile the code themselves, which means that a malicious developer could submit a binary that’s different to the source code.