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 is becoming MORE technologically illiterate, not less. The era of growing up with a home computer that required fiddling and dial up, etc is over. People grow up with phones and iPads and kids come to school not knowing how to use a mouse.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Something that amazes me that I often see is tech literate people wastly over estimating the tech literacy of an average person. Any amount of tech support would tell you that most people barley know the basics and doesn't care for anything else.

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.

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

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.

I can’t do any of the stuff you mentioned. I’m here because I hate traditional social media that are not social at all. And I hate ads. And have an interest in community driven stuff and DIY.

And I don’t feel like I am alone here.

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.

Definitely very echoey in here.

Hello?

^Hello?^

Not my fault. Reddit pushed me here!

We use arch btw.

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

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

I am not tech literate but here I am.

imposter

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

I don't think it's an echo chamber, I think you are wrong about that. The proof is that I am disagreeing with you right now. Therefore, not an echo chamber.

I find the echo chamber to be nice when it is semi tech-minded people that aren't an unending diatribe of reposted wholesome stories/fake chatgpt posts/godawful jokes in the comments that stopped being funny in 2012.

For the past month I've been developing a NixOS platform for local businesses.

I keep overestimating how much people know. It's infuriating trying to wrap my mind around the fact that I don't need to explain why it's amazing, just that it is, and it works. I feel like I'm Mugatu talking to Zoolander at times.

Even if I could perfectly analogise what a declarative operating system is, it wouldn't matter to a client because they don't understand how a non NixOS machine works.

Though, the worst part is trying to explain to someone, who is "happy with Windows" why they should not be.

How the fuck do people in 2025 not fucking loathe Windows? There's fucking ads in the start menu. There's like 4 different places to change settings. The systems bloat and slow to a crawl as the OS ages.

It's fucked.

*with strong beliefs on random topics

I just don't understand how it's more "techy" than Reddit. I just want our user count to keep going up.

I think we should focus less on hyping federation/decentralization and more on how there are no ads and the content is really coming from actual users (and maybe a leftist bias).

I got a few friends on here by explaining that choosing a server is no different from choosing an email provider. Everyone understands email, that you can communicate with most other email users no matter what their provider is.

Yes. And everyone thinks they are the smartest human ever because of it. As you can tell by the responses here lol

My own experience, as someone who is not necessarily tech illiterate, but also not an expert either:

I decided to check out some basic Linux stuff, and found a post directing newcomers to a website that was supposed to be a top-notch beginner's guide. This guide started with a history of Linux, written in the style of an early 2000s GameFAQs guide. It then jumped immediately into selecting a distro, and started describing each option with terms like "lightweight"and "robust" without explaining what those terms meant in that context - or even defining what a distro was in the first place.

As someone who has used Windows for around 3 decades, I could make some inferences to fill in the gaps. But I imagine someone with less experience with PCs would get completely lost.

Now on the flip side, I've also shared in another thread the story of how I lost interest in programming partway through my introductory university course, and mostly received positive feedback. The folks in that thread seemed happy to hear the perspective of an outsider.

I am not a programmer, not a geek, but just the ability to recognize problems and then find and implement the solution gives me the aura of an omniscient wizard. Simple things like: We have an automatic drying machine for work clothes here, but we haven't been able to use it for YEARS! A Google search, manual found. We now have the third coffee machine. They always break because of the chalky water. When we descale, the display still lights up: If I really go through the instructions in the manual step by step, it suddenly works. And that's before we get to any multiple screens or Excel problems with the sum function.

If you can interpret your car's manual, you're a hero. If you can also get hold of the vehicle's repair manual, then you're a wizard. And if you understand the sum function in Excel, then you are a danger to your supervisor.

Probably true but the amount of tech posts fade into insignificance compared to the 60 - 70% Trump/Musk did/says this stupid thing posts.
I know, and it's been going on for years.
Not everyone is american or wants to read about them 20 times per day.