Have literally not even heard of the subject of the 3rd most popular article.

Cultural balkanization in microcosm.

I’m trying to think of something to say in riposte in order to boost the comment count.

Agreed. This seems like the lowest hanging fruit, the absolute minimal solution.

Given the emergence of Bluesky and the parallel rightwing echo chambers, the fediverse does not have the luxury of splittism IMO.

This is my analysis too. And why, instead of just upvoting posts that interest me, I try to think of something to say about them too. The dreaded “0 comments” is never a good look no matter how we much we tell ourselves that it doesn’t matter.

For this reason I tend to believe that many communities just have too much primary content. Too many posts and not enough comments.

Thought experiment. 2 communities:

• /c/one has 15 posts per day, 5 of them with 3 comments, the other 10 with none
• /c/two has 3 posts per day with 5 comments each

Which is the healthier community?

Yes, and mine is that if it is still somehow “mainstream” then it is currently losing that status almost before our eyes.

About the computer claim, it obviously includes the workplace. Seriously, this is a silly non-debate. We have a situation of mass addiction to small touchscreens. It is now possible to do anything on these objects and it’s increasingly impossible to live without them (I had to install a damn app just to open a delivery locker this week). They are not laptops. For personal use, desktop computers of any kind are already an irrelevance.

small screens and the lack of physical keyboards are significant limitations

You’re preaching to the choir in this community, and I personally happen to agree with you. It’s irrelevant. The world has moved on.

What a generous and thoughtful post.

Firstly, chill, it wasn’t meant to be personal, sorry if the tone was hostile.

I was addressing you as an avatar of something I see a lot here (perhaps to be expected) and that frustrates me: a well-intentioned, probably very intelligent geek who talks earnestly about something (desktop computing) that I believe is now all but irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. It frustrates me because the irrelevance seems obvious to me - from the stats, from looking around me in everyday life. And because every day we waste talking about desktop OS is a day lost in the already losing battle to save free computing.

PS: I didn’t downvote you. I don’t downvote, as a matter of principle.

With respect, I think this view is really quite out of touch.

About the Global South, we agree. Most people there have never seen a PC and never will. Already, the Global South is most of the world. The combined population of Europe and North America, i.e. the whole West, is now less than 10% of the world population.

But beyond that, who are these “mainstream” people you see buying PCs for personal use in the West, today, beyond students (PS: and gamers)? What are they buying them for when you now do literally anything on a mobile OS with more convenience (and indeed the mobile OS is increasingly a requirement)? Do you really think that in, say, 5 years, the obvious trend will have spontaneously gone into reverse?

I don’t want any of this to be true either, but true it patently is.

It must be hard to turn down free money, even if it’s powered by a fad. I imagine the people who actually make the bikes must be a bit demoralized though, knowing that their beautiful machines are now mostly destined to gather dust in rich people’s closets.

Mobile is not all that counts. I don’t know anyone without at least one laptop or desktop in the house (typically more)

This is, sadly, the response I was bracing for. You are in a bubble. The rest of the world, certainly outside the US middle class, looks absolutely nothing like your life. The numbers are clear. Outside of offices, computing now means Android and almost nothing else (yes that includes iOS).

Yep of course. Forgive my tetchiness.

To which my first thought is: who cares, because almost no normies are buying desktop computers any more. I say that as a desktop OS user.

It’s not a popular observation around here but the facts are stubborn. I so wish we nerds would wake up, put our own personal experience aside, and concentrate our energies on how to bring FOSS to the mobile platform. Going forwards, it’s all that will count. It’s already all that counts.

This is one dossier where IMO it is genuinely difficult to know which outcome would be best. Assuming one takes into account environmental, as well as political and economic, factors.

That seems to be from a moral standpoint. As a matter of law, it does.

As usual, entirely specific to the USA market.

So cute how spherical robins are. Presumably because of their small size and need to keep the cold at bay. Tiny wrens look even more ball-like.

Difficult to see how these bromides about the Rules-Based Order will do anything but encourage a vain bully like Trump. Because this is personal, it makes no sense in any other terms.

My intuition is that the better response would be measured bellicosity. Say: “Sure you could ‘conquer’ Greenland, but it would be your Afghanistan. The Greenlanders would fight a guerilla war against you, and since Greenland is part of Denmark, we Europeans - your former allies - would have to supply them. After all, it’s part of our territory, we would have no choice. So. Up to you.”

Yep. Really what would interest me in Morocco would be some warmth in winter, but in reality it’s just as cold and damp as the rest of the Med, with even less of a culture of indoor heating and even worse insulated houses! Just spent a not-very-pleasant week in Tangier for these reasons. Same deal everywhere north of Agadir and obviously far worse in the mountains. Time to build that train line to Agadir! But Tangier was otherwise quite a pleasant surprise so I plan to go back at a more comfortable time of year.

Thus proving the almost total arbitrariness of defining Europe as a “continent” but here we are.