anothermember

Yes, the differences are fascinating, I know Minitel was big in France. To my mind it was Freeserve that brought the internet to the masses in the UK (and spawned many dozens of similar ISPs in the late-90s), but seems to be a bit of a footnote now. My peers first started messaging through YIM (Yahoo! Instant Messenger) before MSN took over as the default. I remember AOL was perceived as an expensive ISP which limited the popularity of AIM.

Is this mainly a US-centric take though? In the UK, yes we had AOL here and a fair number of people I knew had it, but it was never dominant as far as I could tell (I'd be happy to be corrected, I only came in around 1997). It was MSN messenger that became established as the dominant instant messenger here by about 2000, I don't really remember too many people using AIM.

Just Thunderbird is fine for me, has all the features I want and I already get my email there (but even if I didn't I'd struggle to find an RSS reader with its features).

Downvotes are disabled on Beehaw, we don't see them even on communities on other instances. I find it makes it a much more pleasant experience.

They deteriorate with time but that said I have tapes from the 80s that are still playable. I'm not sure if there's a worse rate for that timespan compared to disc-rot for CDs, or failures of digital drives. What ever the format I guess the key is to do backups.

Although I don't use them day-to-day any more, cassette tapes are what I have the most warmth and nostalgia for because they're what I grew up with. Messing around with tapes and making mix-tapes were a big part of my childhood and teenage years, difficult to sell to those who never experienced it but I can't think of any other format that allowed that same level of playfulness and creativity.

VLC because it works with everything and it doesn't try to organise my music collection for me.

I was mildly interested until I saw "designed for creators". Seems like a meaningless marketing term that gets added to everything these days.

That didn't exist when I tried TW, but that's something I'll at least try out on a second machine at some point.

One that might be controversial: OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I still have a lot of respect for this distro and I really wanted to like it but it's just not for me. It's the fact that major updates could occur any day of the week, which could be time-consuming to install or they could change the features of the OS. It always presented a dilemma of whether to hold back updates which might include holding back critical updates.

So rolling distros aren't for me, everyone expects to run in to some occasional issues with Arch, but TW puts a lot of emphasis on testing and reliability, so I thought it might be for me. But the reality is I much prefer the release cycle and philosophy of Fedora, I think that strikes the best balance.

I find they're a pain to use and I only have one out of social pressure, and privacy or not I'm constantly confused on why they're so popular.

I just use a throwaway account and have the rule of not putting in any data that I don't want to be read - which is barely anything any way because I do all my computing on my Linux laptop. I figure if they're collecting location data and recording me then they're just associating it with "random guy x" because I've never given it anything else. I should look in to one of the de-Googled Android distributions but I have so little interest and energy in anything to do with it, if it could be made totally private I would still rarely use it.

I kind of feel the main issue on Reddit is people who just don't care and would happily post and upvote irrelevant crap anyway. I don't understand the mentality.