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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
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.