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Cake day: August 30th, 2023

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  • There are some hardware sellers specialized in Linux, no ? the european Tuxedo Computers, and specially the north american System 76 (who is also the developer of PopOS, therefore the closest Linux equivalent of Apple in having both hard and soft wares). They could be the ones to do it by having an incentive (selling hardware in more scale, and merchandising too, also accepting donations). Honestly, a company that focused on just assembling good enough computers that run a very hands-off but functional linux distro (pretty much Ubuntu KDE with flatpaks and lots of pre-installed programs a la Linux Mint), while having a good enough price and most importantly focusing on the marketing in the forms mentioned, could change the status-quo. I agree Fedora, Red Hat, will be catering to companies on the foreseeable future. Ads on Youtube are far reaching and not expensive, and possible to scale with time.


  • GNU Linux users are stuck in the early 20th century in marketing strategies, including you. Rational marketing explaining objectively how product P will help its consumers in XYZ is not the mainstream strategy of marketing anymore. It was surpassed by Irrational marketing, where a company will try to associate specific ideas and emotions with its brand and products, like an ad with big cars riding in rough natural landscapes that will show to everyone who is the real man in the block, who has high income, who is the most sexy, most adventurous, who the hot girl will want to date, etc (and NOT an ad that explains how the SUV has 6x6 wheels, can travel 555,8 miles, carry 1,8 metric tons of cargo, with air conditioning, etc, even if those informations are true).

    Apple did not really explain what their various models of computers are to its clients, they just made several marketing pieces of content (including public performances by steve jobs) that transmitted the ‘‘vibes’’ of what using them ‘‘feels like’’ (i.e. what image apple wanted to associate itself). Being ‘‘futuristic’’, ‘‘smart’’, ‘‘successful’’, ‘‘luxurious’’, ‘‘easy’’, etc.

    They need some actual marketing firm that will do a full psy-ops that manages to associate using linux distros with irrational but desirable traits (ideas, emotions, etc), that common people will identify and start trying to ‘‘Keep up with the Joneses’’ (the joneses being the linux users now). Show using Arch Linux as the knack of genius people that will hack anything they want and earn millions, show using Fedora as the thing of smart successful beautiful rich people, show handsome entrepreneurs doing high middle class work in Mint or Ubuntu, show high score Gamers using RGB PCs with Garuda Linux, etc. That kind of marketing is however generally rejected by Linux proponents.


  • Depends on how you consider several subjective factors, including political, economical, technological and ownership/control.

    Closest to lemmy might be TILvids (Today I Learned videos) → https://tilvids.com

    They use Peertube protocol (FOSS), are sustained by donations (patreon), and there is a few big FOSS influencers there already, like the french developer from The Linux Experiment.

    There is a few corporations that are pretty much national versions of youtube, like Nikoniko (Japan), Rutube (Russia), VK (Russia), Bilibili (China), Aparat (Iran) etc that would be nice if they were competitors cause they already have all the infrastructure in place to receive everything in youtube in one swop if we neeeded, but alas they obviously will not be taken. (sorry nikoniko)

    There is some minor corporations like Odysee, Rumble, Dailymotion, Vimeo. But they are still private profit-driven corporations, so they can go the youtube way eventually. There is some rumours that Tiktok might launch a separate app and site for youtube-style videos too, but again, it is another private corporation and controversial.

    The scale of capital needed for video hosting is several orders of magnitude bigger than text and images, this is why youtube became a de facto monopoly on most parts of the world. There is several text-driven social media sites, including this one, but only one big youtube.