Not really but we have Springer which isn’t much better

Deal with the real problem. Be honest about why people are upset. Let them actually speak their minds without judgement. Then, analyse it. Find solutions.

Exactly. The solution to people saying “Foreigners are taking our jobs” is not to outlaw saying “Foreigners are taking our jobs” (though the AfD has done enough other things that warrant a ban), it’s not to get rid of foreigners, it’s not even to create more jobs. It’s to make sure that people have at least their most important needs (housing, food, transport, access to information, basic entertainment) covered even with a part-time job or no job at all. Instead the CDU/CSU tries to brand everyone who doesn’t work 60 hours per week until they’re 70 as lazy. Guess what? There are way more people out there who would like to work but can’t (for whatever reason) than ones who actively try to cheat the system. And no increase of weekly working time, no mandatory Excel training for unemployed people and no right-shift of politics will solve that.

Show people that the left and center are able to provide what they need and they will have no reason to blame minorities for their problems.

Yeah, guess what? We should have banned them long before they became the “strongest opposition force in parliament”. Now that they poll over 20%, of course its tricky. Who would have thought?

Until they notice that cleaning up after failed AI-written code is more expensive than writing working code from the start. Which is already happening for some companies.

And I think letting everyone decide for themselves how they run their instances and who they federate with is an important cornerstone of the fediverse. I’m more than fine with people not wanting to interact with threads. But what happens on my tiny instance with me as the only active user shouldn’t be cause for outrage.

My question was specifically about “the general non-technical population”. Do you expect my mom to even remotely understand what different servers are and why talking to me is securely encrypted but talking to her friends group isn’t? The point about secure software is that it needs to be secure by default or else, entry level users will manage to accidentally send their stuff in plain text and not even notice.

For nerds like us, I agree that Matrix is probably a good choice. For someone who needed to be told that “the internet” isn’t the blue “e” on their desktop… not so much. I’d rather send carrier pigeons than explain Matrix to my family.

I’ve once been downvoted to oblivion for not defederating threads.com before it even went online. Fediverse people are weird.

What would you recommend as an alternative for the general non-technical population?

I‘ll give my best to give you some feedback if you post something

Dooo iiiiiit! I really enjoy reading about niche homebrew settings.

I even made a new account specifically so I could make it there and not on my personal instance.

Just a regular Mastodon server with federation disabled might be a good start.

I don’t think so. French “tiens” is a form of the verb “tenir” (“hold”). German “tja” is pronounced almost exactly the same and is only used as an interjection with a similar meaning but doesn’t have any related forms that I could think of.

Especially the southern German dialects have quite a few words that originated as loan words from French so it’s at least plausible. Could of course just be a coincidence as well. Languages are full of those.

And this is the moment I realized that German “tja” (“well”) probably comes from French “tiens” even though I’ve had five years of French in school.

I don’t know, am I? I tried to keep it civil, until you argued - multiple times - that everyone who thinks that your software of choice is cumbersome is just too dumb to learn it and got downvoted almost every time. Then you gave me a snippy reply when I politely asked what your professional relationship with that software is.

By the way: software engineer, 22 years hobby, 16 years professional.

Maybe we should just accept that everyone has different needs and experiences and not judge others for not liking the things we like? Does that sound fair?

But aren’t you so great at reading that you get everything the first time and never forget?

Yes, I know I‘m mean right now but you ran into that.

Unemployed, never had to use a piece of software to make money.

May I ask what you do professionally?

Are you intentionally misreading my posts or is this just a superiority complex? It’s not about how long something takes to learn or how often I have to look it up. It’s about how long it takes to do on a daily basis.

And to clarify, I’m not talking about “Why is this function in a different menu than what I’m used to” but “Why does GPlates require me to export my continent coordinates into a text file, copy a line in that file by hand, give that copy a new ID, make sure I made no syntax errors, re-import the text file and then edit the shape of both copies just to split a continent in two halves?” I know how to do that, it’s not too hard to learn. But if there was a knife tool or at least working copy and paste, I could reduce that task from minutes to seconds.