• 38 Posts
  • 75 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • Based on my understanding, primary uses:

    • Read research papers (PDFs). Annotations functionality is a must (includes highlighting, commenting etc).
    • Write university essays, including formatting, academic citations etc. I’d personally stick to Libre Office but realistically, they’re gonna use the MS Office suite. So I’d like to either have MS Office offline on the machine, OR let them use the on-line version easily.
    • Listen to music fairly regularly, so Spotify is a must.
    • Easy access to banking, finance etc.

    Secondary uses:

    • Streaming-wise, they occasionally use Netflix but mostly stream via one of “those websites” if you catch my drift
    • They also like to use a VPN, which I can help set up (I’m planning to use my own OpenVPN instance)
    • Social media, i.e. Gmail, FB etc.

    So yeah, I think the ideal situation would be one that easily allows:

    1. Using MS Office
    2. Using Adobe (I’d have used Okular personally, but it’s annotations are utterly inaccessible if I share my Okular-annotated PDF with an Adobe user and vice versa)
    3. Browser for everything else (I’ll likely give them Brave)





  • I think you’re right in that the structure is confusing. Personally, I think it’s less confusing than it is “novel”. Like in a world where the fediverse was the norm, centralised apps would’ve been confusing.

    Either which way, I think you’re correct – part of it is because we don’t really have a good analogy for how this whole thing works.

    This is how I see it: Lemmy is like a house party hosted in a huge venue that has hundreds of doors (i.e. instances). The doors have some slight differences (maybe some are huge, some are tiny, some have bouncers, some let you bring your own costumes etc). But for the most part, it doesn’t really matter what door you enter the party through, as all doors open into the same common space.

    However, the door you choose does make you physically closer to one cluster of people than the rest of the party. That’s how I see the “local” filter. But if you’re just interested in getting into the party asap, just pick any instance and join.

    This still isn’t a perfect analogy though – if a door shuts down, you don’t magically disappear from the party. But if an instance goes down, you do. Still, for the uninitiated, I feel like this is a sensible enough analogy.