It's also a shitty take because it hypes up Meta. Which basically took Instagram (handling billions of users posting text, images and videos) and creating Threads by turning images and video off. It's the same user accounts too.
That's like Google creating YouTweet by taking their YouTube platform and reducing it to video comments only. Then praising them that they managed to launch a text based service in 2023.
Why not actually talk about Mastodon instead?
This is a shitty take. Twitter ran perfectly fine before Musk took it over.
Turns out if you don't pay your hosting bills, or your office building bills, fire most of your engineers (after annoying them with bullshit) and making rash decisions without consulting people with technical know-how your service goes to shit.
Musk was stupid enough to DDOS his own service because he doesn't understand it. Blocking public access to tweets while having tweets embedded in millions of websites turned out to be a really bad idea. Simply because Twitter engineers always expected Tweets to be publicly available, so they kept retrying to fetch the data. There's probably a hundred+ developers at Twitter who could have told Musk that little tidbit.
This is 100% on the egomaniacal billionaire and has nothing to do with the technology.
That's a weird question, you are comparing a desktop OS with a phone OS (except you are talking about Windows phones, but I don't think you are?).
All it takes to kill your Windows installation is double clicking a random .exe file (and being unlucky that Windows doesn't warn you about this particular file). And nope, if it is a custom program your antivirus won't detect it either. Every time I hear of a company getting a crypto locker on their systems it was over a Windows PC (mostly by email). I haven't heard of your average company getting compromised by a phone yet (but those phones usually don't have network access to shared drives..).
Android is relatively locked down, a lot more than Windows. Even if someone sends you malware per email, there is no easy way to execute it on your phone. It's also not true that you can just install a rogue APK in two clicks, you have to do the following steps:
Definitely not something that happens by accident :)
Overall for your average user I'd say Android is safer.
Dude, you can't trust any Lemmy instance at all. It doesn't even matter that the code is open source, the instance owner could just compile their own version that sends them every password in plaintext. There is zero guarantee that your password is safe.
Anyone who reuses passwords has been pwned a dozen times already. Just check your own logins here: https://haveibeenpwned.com/
If you reuse passwords online you have a problem, it's simple as that. Even big companies had breaches that leaked user data, no company is safe. For example one of my old passwords got stolen from Adobe. One from Unreal Engine. And my old logins are currently shared in 2,844 separate data breaches. Not using a password manager with a random password per service nowadays is madness.
But as OP said, they already failed several times. That's like telling someone who nearly drowned in the shallow end of a pool to go jump into the ocean.
See here:
So what would be a good distro to look into for a novice and where should I look for a tutorial?
For me it feels like they do want to learn, but aren't comfortable yet as a day to day user. They want to use Linux, but struggle with commands and how to use it. Having a stable and easy to use system you can use each day without trouble would probably be a better start than telling them to fiddle with Arch. Give them an easy distro and when they want to learn more they can use the crappy old laptop and try to install Arch on there (while leaving their daily driver alone).
I think I learned the most when using Ubuntu for school, 90% of it was easy and straight forward. 10% of it was hell, like back in the day getting HDMI or audio to work. But because the 90% were there I just dug in and spent a dozen hours to troubleshoot the rest.
I tried that after already having about 2 years experience with Ubuntu desktop and an Ubuntu server (but still mostly a Windows user). I'm also a software developer.
And I failed to install Arch on a laptop the last time I tried it out. Ubuntu ran flawlessly, trying to go step by step through the Arch installation I hit a random error (at a step that was very straight forward and easy in the documentation) and got stuck. Messed around with it and at some point gave up.
I mean that's years ago, it probably works a lot better nowadays and especially on more modern hardware, but even so for someone new to Linux I'd never tell them to go with a do-it-yourself install. Slap Ubuntu on that bad boy, let them install a few packages, do a handful of terminal commands and they'll get much farther. Instead of giving up three hours in because a random command (that they still don't understand) is broken.
Sorry, but that's literally every online service. For example if you buy a new virtual server it takes like 5 minutes till a Chinese IP starts to try root passwords.
If someone actually wanted to harm Lemmy they'd just DDOS the biggest instances for a month (which would be easy, it's mostly single servers after all) or attack it with so much spam and large images that storage would break.
Nothing is safe.
Use a password manager and a unique random password for each service you sign up with. It's the only way to protect your accounts.
The solution has been the same for the last 20 years: Use a password manager, do not reuse passwords. That's it, you're done.
Even if the Lemmy instance admin steals your password (which would be easy!) they can't do anything with it.
That's really not the point. If the instance you post on is defederated from Threads and you create a valuable post (for example a lengthy review of some hardware) then Meta can't just copy your post and put it on their platform. It would be stealing/a copyright violation.
If Meta gets your content then they can (ab)use it. Put ads on it, charge to see it, mask it as their own content, whatever. So wanting to defederate from Meta is absolutely valid and if Meta steals your post you could force them to take it down.
Meta just reading the content to train AI.. not much you can do there. But putting your post up on their platform to serve to their users is a wholly different beast. Even when federated they would have to show your username@yourinstance.com and can't just say they created it.
I'm so confused about the new line syntax. Why can't I just do a single new line and keep typing? Why does the previous line have to end with a double space?
It's weird, what is the benefit there?