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This encapsulates something the article misses: those with technical know-how can typically still thrive with others while living a tech-ascetic lifestyle, but

This encapsulates something the article misses: those with technical know-how can typically still thrive with others while living a tech-ascetic lifestyle, but the facade is broken as soon as non-technical friends and family come into the picture. My most-used means of file transfer is "e-mailed zip file", and generally this works well - until, of course, someone can't open a zip file on their phone. Which I'd assume is most phone users. The phone doesn't need an unzip utility, because a phone user expects a link to some cloud service (Google Photos, etc.) to achieve the same thing. The content doesn't live on the device; it's just a dumb terminal. Taken to its extreme, I recently had to downmix several HD videos taken on a phone onto a DVD, and _physically mail it overseas_, because even the cloud option wasn't open to the user.

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cortesoft 5y ago
The article discusses this exact point: > The thing that has always bothered me about this, and which continues to bother me, is that I’m only able to live this lifestyle because I have the technical know-how. The average person would neither know how to do any of the things I’m doing (installing a custom Android ROM, setting up Nextcloud, etc.), nor would they probably want to, given that it’s a lot of extra hassle for a sub-par experience.
pjc50 5y ago
I'm deep into "I know how to do this stuff, or could work it out, but I really cannot be bothered and will put up with the mostly-adequate experience so long as someone else manages it". I used to run my own mail server. Heck, I used to lease out shell accounts and run email for other people. But gmail is just better at dealing with spam, probably because they manage a huge fraction of all email. I still have the 20-year old email address, ticking over, delivering mail into a shell account run by someone else. It's about 50% spam, 49% things I've not bothered to unsubscribe from, and 1% really important stuff from long-dormant sources that I'd forgotten about. And of course it's there if I need to go back for whatever reason.
treeman79 5y ago
Back in 90s, I was trying to send a game to a friend via dialup. After 3 hours of failed attempts I gave up and walked a floppy disk 2 miles to his house.

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cortesoft 5y ago

The article discusses this exact point: > The thing that has always bothered me about this, and which continues to bother me, is that I’m only able to live this lifestyle because I have the technical know-how. The average person would neither know how to do any of the things I’m doing (installing a custom Android ROM, setting up Nextcloud, etc.), nor would they probably want to, given that it’s a lot of extra hassle for a sub-par experience.

pjc50 5y ago

I'm deep into "I know how to do this stuff, or could work it out, but I really cannot be bothered and will put up with the mostly-adequate experience so long as someone else manages it". I used to run my own mail server. Heck, I used to lease out shell accounts and run email for other people. But gmail is just better at dealing with spam, probably because they manage a huge fraction of all email. I still have the 20-year old email address, ticking over, delivering mail into a shell account run by someone else. It's about 50% spam, 49% things I've not bothered to unsubscribe from, and 1% really important stuff from long-dormant sources that I'd forgotten about. And of course it's there if I need to go back for whatever reason.

treeman79 5y ago

Back in 90s, I was trying to send a game to a friend via dialup. After 3 hours of failed attempts I gave up and walked a floppy disk 2 miles to his house.