Very much so, when I brought up that I am a software developer who just loves using their Macbook, because it just works, I was told I stupid because I am now locked in and what if I want to compile my own flavor of window manager, like with no sense of fucking irony.

I can live with that.

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.

I don't know how to code, but I know my way around computers.

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

from my interactions with people after i told them i switched from chrome, the average person doesn’t know the difference between a web browser and a search engine…

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.

I am not tech literate like most programmers or coders, but I can look up things and read. Usually covers most of my needs overall, so it's better than nothing. Where I work I am seen as on par with any IT person but I just literally read instructions and follow them. Tried to explain it, but they treat it like I was blessed by the tech gods or something.

It seems like a lot of people almost delight in their tech illiteracy. And the big corporations are laughing all the way to the bank.

I discovered the USB boot by accident and thought my laptop bricked for no reason!

like the early internet the tech gap was a natural filter and i see that as a good thing for the quality of the conversation.

This used to be what people said about digg and then about reddit

Well that sometimes keeps the conversation clean though. Most computer people seem to be a little more intelligent than the average person.

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

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.

in a simplified phrase, fediverse is the linux of social media. I'm not saying this is good or bad.

since the front page consists of linux and survillance hate

It totally is. That's why I'm here. Depending on the server, you also get a side of non-authoritarianism and strong privacy beliefs.

About the time they get a list of services to pick for sign up, they lose interest or freeze, exhibiting decision paralysis. That one time they installed ImagineDragns.exe and the computer had to be taken to be cleaned, set them down a path of I don't know what this is, I won't touch it that keep us employed.

I use Linux because I’m too tech illiterate for Windows, I needed something that just worked out of the box

or at least navigate a directory through the command line

Why, obviously. I mean who hasn't read through the ls(1) man page at least once?