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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Definitely very echoey in here.

Hello?

^Hello?^

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.

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

We use arch btw.

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.

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.

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.

i don't claim to have much computer knowledge, but people look at me like I have two heads when I suggest using a YouTube client without ads or download Blokada. Hell, the amount of people who don't use Firefox (or a fork of it) and uBlock Origing are insane

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.

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.

On the topic of echo chambers - At what point did we decide that a bunch of people over a wide geographical area with similar interests and a common code of standards/preferences of civility... Is a bad thing?

It's kind of how social clubs exist irl.

Me being like "what does it mean to boot from a USB 👁️👄👁️"

Fr though, the account thing is not too far off. When I made my first account (when the Reddit thing happened, it was on lemm.ee) I absolutely didn't understand jack shit and what I was doing. I was very ready to throw in the towel. I didn't understand how to add communities, how to search for communities, anything. I still have problems grasping the whole server thing. (Or what a server is.)

So a lot of times I feel excluded here, or at least like an unallowed invader, or a feral maniac just running around, throwing stuff at a wall and looking for what sticks. But that's ok. I'm happy I'm still here and one day I might even know what a command line is.

not sure how most do anything. echo? most need a button says 'click here'. can drag a horse to water...

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 average person probably couldn't figure it out because they don't care to. If you tell someone "Make a Lemmy account"ntheyll be confused. If you tell someone "Make an account at https://lemmy.world/" they'll figure it out. It's like if you give someone a puzzle but it's boring and they don't care to solve it, they're probably not gonna take the time to solve it.

Not my fault. Reddit pushed me here!

The reason I am still with .world is because I cant be arsed to figure out how to kove instance or remember hownI set it up.

I can copy command line prompts from forums and chatgpt to my newly linted linux pc...that I dont really use because I cant figure shit out.

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.

Where's the meme of the wojack at the party standing in the corner saying "They don't even know how to boot from USB"