Oh I understand it alright.
I understand that you guys are FUCKED, and since my country is in the US's sphere of influence, eventually so will we be fucked.
Oh I play retrogames alright
But in emulation, with save states and rewind. And fuck any pretentious retrogamer that would call me a faker for that.
Can't speak for any country but my own (Brazil)
The reason WhatsApp is such a thing here is an interesting little historical path.
See, texting never really took off here in Brazil. Because phone service providers would charge per individual message. And while the charge was like 5 cents per message, that shit builds up. So unless you're rich... You won't be texting.
So when smartphones, and with them, data plans (that offered very little data, around 4 gigs is the average nowadays, it was a few megs back then) came around, internet-based messaging services became our texting. Because if you have, idk, 512 megs of data in your plan, that's not a lot but it is more than enough for messaging over an app.
WhatsApp was the one that got popular, no idea why.
It was popular with the youths(tm) first in the early 10s, then families hopped on, dragged in by their young-adult kids no doubt, and then... Everything! Because once the Boomers had learned how to use this one app, every business under the sun realised it could serve their purposes as well. And eventually... So did the government.
You want to order pizza? WhatsApp. Want to contact a government agency? WhatsApp. Want to schedule a doctor's appointment? WhatsApp.
Now, I got my friends and family on Telegram, largely because Telegram has nicer features (still closed source though grumble grumble) but I still need WhatsApp for work. It's how I talk to everyone: The team, the boss, the contacts, etc.
The conversation in this thread reminded me of a thing I saw on Reddit ages ago, of feeding /dev/random into aplay with some parameters I unfortunately forgot, to get a series of random noise that sounds almost musical.
Without the parameters you just get white noise sadly.
It's true but while no padding would be ideal, I'll take busywork padding over NES style "overwhelming difficulty spike" padding any day.
Are we 100% sure those are even persons running the accounts, and not LLM bots trained on the worst Twitter Threads imaginable?
Personally, I feel like you can have fun on fedi, but it all depends on the accounts/communities you follow. My Sharkey feed AND my Lemmy feed are both full of memes, fandom nonsense, and shitposts. If you only follow serious communities and people that talk about serious news, you'll have a serious time.
That said, one thing that I thought was unpleasant about the fediverse, and then realised was a feature rather than a bug is... The fact that you can run out of fediverse content. After 2 hours on Lemmy, I have functionally read all of Lemmy (or, well, all the communities I care to read), and maybe 1 more hour to join conversations I'd like to join.
Compared to the seemingly infinite content stream of The Other Sites (tm), this initially struck me as bad and weird, but then I realised... I actually prefer it this way. Doomscrolling a fedi site/app is actually not possible, and that has done wonders for my mental health.
Assuming they don't know what you'll be doing after?
Say "found a new opportunity."
You could be headed into unemployment and that'd still be a businesslike and no nonsense reply.
The secret to making 1(one) good joke is to make 10.000 jokes that are terrible to weak first.
Ixe. Já tem comunidade de suddenlycaralho no Lemmy? Precisa ter.
Masturbation.
Or playing old console games.
Yeah, a user is passive. Now if you contribute to FLOSS projects, either with money or knowledge, then we can talk about your ethical superiority (I totally don't btw, can't afford the money, and don't have the knowledge)