It’s pretty amazing that it’s as cohesive as it is.

That’s a very good point. I’ve often wondered that myself. We may have reached peak Linux already - it’s so hard to scale up massive FOSS projects without somehow sacrificing ideals on the way.

Many things in a FOSS ecosystem will sooner or later confront you with one hard truth:

The program you’re using was not developed for you.

It was developed because the creator saw a problem and wanted to fix it. Then they made a program to fix it and stopped refining the program the moment they were content with it. Little to no consideration for other users or mass-adoption. Which is fine, they developed it, it’s their time.
But it also means that you will frequently be confronted with things that are objectively unintuitive and unreasonable from a new user’s perspective because they make sense from a developer’s perspective. The former will always be outranked by the latter, even though there will always be more users than developers. Unfortunately that’s just how it is. There are some few exceptions, but they are just that, exceptions.

That’s why Lemmy is such a GDPR nightmare :(

I know you’re trying to sound optimistic, but that particular example required significant (worldwide, in fact) external intervention…

You unfortunately can’t teach something like this to someone who doesn’t even understand the consequences of it. Or care.

You can absolutely explain it and teach it and make people care. It’s just not easy. I’ve only ever encountered uninformed “I have nothing to hide”-responses to equally lackluster throwaway explanations . It’s a very difficult and abstract topic, it doesn’t come naturally! Don’t treat privacy concerns as equivalent to pointing out dirt on someone’s clothes, treat it like calculus. Successfully conveying it requires time, conversation and didactics.

Correct! Is that particularly important?

The Bay never went away. It’s always been there for you and it will always be there for you.