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.
Just Thunderbird is fine for me, has all the features I want and I already get my email there (but even if I didn’t I’d struggle to find an RSS reader with its features).
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.
VLC because it works with everything and it doesn’t try to organise my music collection for me.
I was mildly interested until I saw “designed for creators”. Seems like a meaningless marketing term that gets added to everything these days.
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.
You’re not the first person I’ve heard who said that so there must be something there. That’s not my experience however, I find that Reddit makes me angry these days, getting annoyed at all the low-effort, inconsiderate posting. Having a debate on Reddit is impossible I find because saying something that goes slightly against the hive-mind you’ll you’ll be passive-aggressively downvoted, which has a chilling effect on what people say. I like that Beehaw doesn’t have downvotes, especially on local communities. On Beehaw/Lemmy someone might argue with you but that’s at least better I think than the knee-jerk downvote-to-oblivion you get on Reddit.
It’s true that a lot of people are more similar here than on Reddit. I’d argue that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The one-size-fits-all social network for everybody approach I think doesn’t work, it’s more natural to choose a group you fit in to and feel comfortable with (which is how things were on old style forums and message boards). What ever happens to Lemmy/Beehaw in the future, the main thing I hope for is to have plenty of choice of smaller forums which is what’s been lacking in the last decade or so.
Can’t even vote without a Google account.
It cuts out a lot of spam and low-effort posting.
I kind of feel the main issue on Reddit is people who just don’t care and would happily post and upvote irrelevant crap anyway. I don’t understand the mentality.
Oh right, I was stupid, I see it now.
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.