They both agreed with each other but were arguing with a strawman. One said

their precious smartphones might be problematic.

The other said

maybe smartphones play a role

Which mean the same thing.

I’m not as optimistic as you.

Hosting video is really expensive. Making video is really expensive. YouTube was losing money for about 15 years despite having a monopoly on online video for most of that time and the best advertising tech in the world. I don’t think it’s possible to make a free competitor to YouTube.

On the paid side, there’s plenty of streaming services that are making money. But you have to be already established in order to get a contract. And since you will typically have to use social media in order to get past that initial barrier, it might as well include YouTube.

However, my guess is that YouTube makes the majority of it’s money from larger channels. If the larger channels all join paid streaming services(e.g. Nebula) then gradually that may be able to bring YouTube down.

monkrus.ws idk how it works but it’s even easier than installing the legit way.

Yes, even for them, the information they can get through a phone is lifesaving. They can learn how to build water supply and sanitation systems and shelter. They can learn how to farm and forage for food. They can find the best way to cross international borders and become a refugee. And so on, they can improve every aspect of their lives. Information is power, and with a smartphone they have access to the entire world, rather than just word of mouth knowledge in their local community.

Obviously, places without any form of electricity are screwed, but satellite internet is rapidly becoming cheaper and more accessible so soon they won’t even need cell coverage.

2. Those in extreme poverty need access to more important things than access to these gadgets.

We’re going down a sidetrack here but this is just false. A smartphone these days is a ticket to many things required to live. Applying for jobs, applying for government services, buying essential items cheaply, cheap/free education.

2FA is entirely offline. So it’s not really the same service and there’s nothing to breach.

Don’t buy a Windows key. If Windows was installed initially it should remember your hardware and activate. If it doesn’t, there’s numerous ways to pirate Windows.

Why would you hand your browsing data to the VPN company? It’s just moving the problem.

Third party servers aren’t always enough. Microsoft managed to ruin 3rd party Minecraft servers.

Looking at history, it feels more like an attempt to make sure the poorest don’t fall into the “nothing left to lose” category that can cause so much trouble.

That’s because it is. That’s the point of welfare, give the poorest something to lose and they won’t revolt. Even if it’s the most meager, unfair, dehumanizing scraps.

Debian. The basic install is very bare bones.

I liked Quora as recently as a few years ago, it had some nice explanations that you couldn’t get anywhere else. Obviously you have to take everything with a grain of salt, but you have to do that anywhere on the internet.

Yes, they are also as painful as possible for every other browser. That’s the point.

Further evidence for this is ChromeOS. It’s just a Linux distro, but worse. It does little more than run Chrome. Yet it’s popular. Anyone that tolerates ChromeOS would have an even better time on most of the standard distros if they had someone to set it up for them.

I haven’t had any issues with Nextcloud yet. But any torrent client refuses to work. I’ve tried various qbittorrent containers, transmission, deluge briefly, they all work for a while but eventual refuse to do anything.

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.

Which makes the argument that heat pumps don’t work in the cold completely wrong from a user perspective.