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.
My parents would send me to school with peanut butter and Marmite sandwiches. Slightly annoying that just because there’s a ready-mixed version that people are now acting like it’s a new thing, but at least more people get to experience it.
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.
Posting from a Beehaw account I think does have a psychological effect on me that causes me to naturally tone things down a bit. I think it’s been good for me.
Beehaw is a quieter experience than most because it has narrower federation, but you do tend to get a better signal to noise ratio since you miss the spammier instances - I like it.
Beehaw also doesn’t federate downvotes which I think is an improvement.
How many times have you setup Fedora or any other Linux distribution and have every single thing working from the get go?
I’m talking drivers, audio, networking, libraries, DNF, repositories, plugins, runtime dependencies, …
Is proprietary software any easier than that though? Don’t you have to put in much more time removing all the spyware and bloat they put in and then spend all your time perpetually fighting against forced updates and applications being installed without your permission?
Whereas with Fedora my experience is more or less install it and forget it.
The “it’s easier” argument for proprietary software I think died at least 15 years ago.
Choice of applications is a different argument.
Completely agree. Now my hot take for this thread:
If governments some time in the 90s had decided from the start to ban computer hardware from being sold with pre-installed software then we wouldn’t have this problem. If everyone had to install their own operating system from scratch, which like you say isn’t hard if it’s taught, it would have killed the mystery around computing and people would feel ownership over their computers and computing.
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.