Is this mainly a US-centric take though? In the UK, yes we had AOL here and a fair number of people I knew had it, but it was never dominant as far as I could tell (I’d be happy to be corrected, I only came in around 1997). It was MSN messenger that became established as the dominant instant messenger here by about 2000, I don’t really remember too many people using AIM.
Downvotes are disabled on Beehaw, we don’t see them even on communities on other instances. I find it makes it a much more pleasant experience.
They deteriorate with time but that said I have tapes from the 80s that are still playable. I’m not sure if there’s a worse rate for that timespan compared to disc-rot for CDs, or failures of digital drives. What ever the format I guess the key is to do backups.
OpenSUSE, it’s what I’d be using if Fedora didn’t exist.
It was Red Hat Linux 8.0 (not to be confused with RHEL 8), I think, that I first dabbled in Linux, that was around early 2003, and then I moved on to Fedora Core 1. But I went exclusively-Linux with Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) in 2006.
I’ve moved around since then but for the last 5 years I’ve ended up back on Fedora, where I’ve been since version 28, now version 39.
Although I don’t use them day-to-day any more, cassette tapes are what I have the most warmth and nostalgia for because they’re what I grew up with. Messing around with tapes and making mix-tapes were a big part of my childhood and teenage years, difficult to sell to those who never experienced it but I can’t think of any other format that allowed that same level of playfulness and creativity.
4.20 still feels like yesterday
I’m surprised at that, from my experience I think it’s still more normal than not to have analogue clocks at home, and I would always prefer an analogue watch.
It just adds another layer of abstraction when my file manager works just fine. I think it started back in the iPod days, and now you have a generation of people who don’t know how to manage files.
I think you’re right then, and honestly I can’t say I’ve noticed.
VLC because it works with everything and it doesn’t try to organise my music collection for me.
I’ve never heard of sugarcoating pills, is it a US thing maybe?
I was mildly interested until I saw “designed for creators”. Seems like a meaningless marketing term that gets added to everything these days.
Beehaw is my favourite instance, if it left I would stay with it but and also use a different instance to use Lemmy.
I would worry that Beehaw couldn’t sustain itself outside of federation though, it needs to be either bigger or fill more of a niche and it doesn’t do either. I would give it some time to grow more first if it were up to me.
Because anything truly outside of our senses (or ability to measure) is non-falsifiable, so if it can’t impact us it’s essentially meaningless. If it can impact us then it can be measured and become science.
That didn’t exist when I tried TW, but that’s something I’ll at least try out on a second machine at some point.
One that might be controversial: OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I still have a lot of respect for this distro and I really wanted to like it but it’s just not for me. It’s the fact that major updates could occur any day of the week, which could be time-consuming to install or they could change the features of the OS. It always presented a dilemma of whether to hold back updates which might include holding back critical updates.
So rolling distros aren’t for me, everyone expects to run in to some occasional issues with Arch, but TW puts a lot of emphasis on testing and reliability, so I thought it might be for me. But the reality is I much prefer the release cycle and philosophy of Fedora, I think that strikes the best balance.
It’s just occurred to me that that would be difficult to do on Lemmy, since not everyone’s federated to the same instances.
I really think that’s a separate issue, which needs to be discussed as a completely separated issue. I agree ads by their nature are manipulative, they serve the website and the advertiser not the user. I think that once ads are non user-tracking then we can have a discussion about advertising ethics and deceptive advertising (online ads have always been terrible even before they were privacy invading) but you can’t have that discussion when it’s mixed in with privacy issues. Only once you take away the privacy issues then we can have the conversation about ad-pollution versus website revenue.
Yes, the differences are fascinating, I know Minitel was big in France. To my mind it was Freeserve that brought the internet to the masses in the UK (and spawned many dozens of similar ISPs in the late-90s), but seems to be a bit of a footnote now. My peers first started messaging through YIM (Yahoo! Instant Messenger) before MSN took over as the default. I remember AOL was perceived as an expensive ISP which limited the popularity of AIM.