Don’t worry, my fair tech-literate maiden. I, a tech-dyslexic, am here to bring down the collective IQ and make the chamber echo less. You can thank me later, for adding some much needed intellectual diversity to the mix.

The average person can’t even download the right authenticator app when prompted. The average person can’t type their password the same way two times in a password change field. The average person does not know how to plug monitors and peripherals into a docking station.

Whatever you think the average skill level is? It’s lower than that. By a lot.

This is true but I ultimately don’t care.

Is there any social media site that isn’t an echo chamber? They’re designed that way on purpose in most cases.

There are enough forums catering to idiots. I appreciate the better moderation, tech savviness, and lack of tolerance for right wing BS on Lemmy.

Relevant xkcd: Average familiarity

You severly overestimate the average persons tech literacy even when you try to correct for it. Booting from USB is already a really advanced topic.

Though creating a lemmy account is not that complex. Typically all you have to do is fill out a form on the websiten instructions included. The problem there is not the tech literacyn but the willingness of the people to even interact with systems they don’t know, like finding a home instance or understanding the concept of the fediverse. Most people could create a lemmy account, though also most people wouldn’t.

Linux is second nature to us geeks, so it’s easy to forget that the average person probably knows just Ubuntu or Fedora.

And Debian GNU/Linux, of course.

I lived in a tech echo chamber until I was in my 30s. This is because my dad is a baby boomer computer engineer who was working with computers since the 70s and we always had a computer at home (no consoles, just computers). First was a c64, we even briefly had a c128 (that didn’t work) and then we got a 386 followed by pentium machines and we first hooked up to the internet in the 90s… and before the internet we went on dial up BBSes run by ultra nerds.

My dad still keeps up with tech and is probably better with computers than many recent CS graduates. It wasn’t until I worked in tech support that I realized… Holy shit! There are people who have no idea their computers have directories! As in, if the shortcut isn’t on their desktop, then their program might as well not exist.

Also one thing I learned that if you tell someone to go to a site and you spell the URL to them, then 99.9% of the time they will Google it, because they don’t know what an address bar is.

I used to think those ‘how to use a computer’ courses in college were a giant waste of time (and an easy A for people like us) but I realize that these people could absolutely benefit from something like that.

And that is when I was working with people who had laptops mostly. When I worked in mobile tech support… fuck me! Do you realize that for a sizable chunk of the population the only computer they have is their smart phone? Those people are far, far worse. When I worked in mobility we were not allowed to hang up on clients for any reason (it was grounds for immediate termination) but at least a few times a week I had to deal with a client who did not know how to hang up their phone! No joke. They were accustomed to the other person hanging up and they didn’t know how to do it!

This is doubly frustrating when those people are using flip phones rhat have a clear hang up button on them.

So yeah, acknowledging we are in a bubble is a good thing. But it isn’t a bad thing to hang out with fellow tech nerds either.

Not me. I am so out of the loop here. But I loved the social aspect of reddit and was on it long enough to know how great it was when it was young. Hoping to find that here.

The way I look at it is, the more echo chambers you are in and out of, the more complete of a picture you can get as a whole.

Yes, Lemmy is a certain kind of echo chamber. But you can’t really be part of an online community these days that doesn’t tend toward becoming one.

You just have to diversify to keep the thread. And Lemmy is a very important part of that diversification for me.

Why would normal people know how to boot from usb? Shit, if you clean the ads out of a windows start menu, a normie will think you’re a wizard for doing the inconceivable.

Better than the generally illiterate echo chambers in other parts of my daily life.

Not my fault. Reddit pushed me here!

you are 100% correct, however, the longer im here, the more tech literate i become, the easier it becomes for me to explain it to others, and thus, the fediverse grows. word of mouth to those willing to take the plunge.

you cant force people to learn something, but being able to sell it convincingly helps, especially if you know what you are talking about, and arent abbrasive or judgemental.

linux community / privacy communities rock here.

also general conversation feels more honest and constructive. instead of the whole “WeLl AcTuAlLy!” type of shit you get on reddit. it happens, but nowhere nearly as much.

also, way less censorship. comparing feeds from lemmy to reddit, is like apples to oranges.

this feels like a much more human space to me.

makes sense, since Linux users (me) are drawn to foss projects like moths to a light

You are completely correct and their comments prove it. The bubble is strong here. But it’s a pretty nice bubble

Anonymity and the general public do not mix. Barrier to entry is all we have left.