Social media as a whole, honestly. Way back in 2014 I read an article about the “social media cycle” (not their words IIRC). Basically, a new platform gets popular with teens and college-age kids, then their parents join, then the kids have to move to something else because they don’t want to be on the same platform as their parents. I could be misremembering. It was a comparison between Facebook and Snapchat.

Anyway, the Fediverse helps, but since fedi platforms are largely clones of their normie counterparts (Lemmy/PieFed = reddit, Mastodon = Twitter, PeerTube = YouTube) they inherit many of the same problems. I know I bring this up a lot, but on these platforms, content is the focus, but on traditional forums, people are the focus.

I don’t want a phone so thin and slippery I can’t hold it in my hand. I want a phone as thicc as an old gray brick Game Boy. When I drop it on the floor I want to have to replace the floor. I want a battery that will outlast the lifespan of the sun.

I’m not even a “regular user” per se, just not a software dev. I’m a network administrator working in a data center. I think a lot of FOSS devs think their users are like themselves, they love to tinker and don’t mind if their PC is a project. And sometimes I do like to tinker, but sometimes I need a computer to be a tool, not an end in itself, and desktop Linux rarely serves in that capacity.

I’m going to get downvoted for this

Open source has its place, but the FOSS community needs to wake up to the fact that documentation, UX, ergonomics, and (especially) accessibility aren’t just nice-to-haves. Every year has been “The Year of the Linux Desktop™” but it never takes off, and it never will until more people who aren’t developers get involved.

The concept confuses and infuriates me. I’m just going to stick a game console or Blu-ray player on it, but you can’t buy a TV these days that doesn’t have a bloated “smart” interface. The solution, for me at least, is a computer monitor. I don’t need or want a very large screen, and a monitor does exactly one thing, and that’s show me what I’ve plugged into it.

I don’t know you or your roommate’s current financial situation, but if they’re struggling to buy dog food there may be assistance programs, perhaps not for the dog, but for his own expenses, that can free up money for the dog.

I’m pretty sure you can’t even do that with traditional service dogs. I think vet and food expenses for a service dog can be deducted from taxes as a medical expense (not financial advice!) but not charged to human health insurance.

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Man, physical web directories! I wasn’t “around” for them but it’s wild to think the web was that small once. I was born in the mid 80s but didn’t even hear the word internet until around 1996.

I do remember webrings though. That was one way to discover new websites before algorithms took over. Not great for research probably but a fun way to explore.

Guide dog user here. My life and those of other guide and service dog handlers have been made much more inconvenient by the abuse of the “emotional support animal” label. I don’t want to dismiss the concept wholesale, as my guide dog has been a tremendous emotional anchor in addition to a mobility aid, and I wouldn’t want to deny others that benefit.

However, as wonderful a dog as Brownie surely is, can he traverse a grocery store without sticking his nose in the produce? Can he tolerate walking inches away from cars going past at 30 MPH? Will he get back on track if distracted by other animals? Can he board and ride an elevator, escalator, bus, or plane without panicking? Will he tolerate a fixed bathroom schedule and can he hold it for hours if that schedule cannot be met? Can he ignore others trying to pet or feed him? Will he lie still and quiet in an unfamiliar place? Traditional service dogs are bred and trained to handle these things, and not every dog is cut out for service work. I have trained with three guide dogs, and every time someone in my class has had to swap dogs because the dog they were first given showed resource guarding behavior, or raised its hackles at another dog, or was too flighty around cars, etc. And this was after selective breeding, puppy screening, a year’s worth of socialization with a puppy raiser, and months of professional training.

Talk about the weather

A wild meteorologist appears.

I messed with Esperanto and Lojban in high school, but when someone says they’re a conlanger they usually mean they make their own languages. This is my most developed conlang, and I’m working on another one used in the same setting.

Constructed languages. It’s a profoundly lonely hobby. I would love to randomly meet another conlanger IRL

Not much has changed. I might move to Piefed.

Smaller sites like niche phpBB forums are barely hanging on under the tide of spammers and crawlers (AI or otherwise). They don’t have the means to defend against what is effectively a DDoS, and are forced to increase the onboarding friction by requiring an email requesting an account or use other things like CAPTCHA or stoop to using a centralized CDN like Cloudflare.

Related rant: it doesn’t have to be perfect to be unironically enjoyable. 15 years of cynical YouTube reviewers have conditioned us to think otherwise.

Not a movie, but I’ve learned to love amateur sci fi stories because I love seeing someone’s raw imagination unfiltered by editors and focus groups, even if I have to slog through some bad prose. Sure it’s a different kind of enjoyment than I get out of more polished fare, but it is genuine appreciation.

The gingerbread man

This is the correct answer. Even Pizza the Hutt seems to agree.

When I wrote the above I was thinking about FOSS generally which wasn’t what the OP was asking so I apologize. Lemmy is more navigable with a screen reader compared to Reddit, though improvements can be made.

I do stand by my statement regarding FOSS generally, especially desktop Linux. I feel legitimately trapped in Windows because accessibility on Linux was poor when I first started using it in 2009 and as actually gotten worse since then.

I’m bitter that my blindness bars me from the security and privacy Linux offers over Windows.

UX sucks. Accessibility is nonexistent.