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An edit of xkcd 2501, “Average Familiarity”:
[Ponytail and Cueball are talking. Ponytail has her hand raised, palm up, towards Cueball.]
Ponytail: Open-source alternatives are second nature to us foss nerds, so it’s easy to forget that the average person probably only knows Linux and one or two degoogled Android ROMs.
Cueball: And Firefox, of course.
Ponytail: Of course.
[Caption below the panel]
Even when they’re trying to compensate for it, experts in anything wildly overestimate the average person’s familiarity with their field.
partly inspired by the replies to this post but i see this kind of thing all the time (shoutout to the person who once genuinely asked “who still uses google these days?”)
made with this neat tool
it’s different when they become informed and choose to remain part of the problem for convinience ☹️
Why? I can fully unterstand a person working a hard job, having family and more than a handful of things to care about saying to themselves “Nah… no time or energy to look into that, I use what already works”
The real problem is when people gatekeep cool open source projects. Not a great way to grow a community.
Gatekeeping is sometimes necessary, otherwise you end up with a project that was cool at some time in the past.