Those niche places act like a filter, pretty much alike as the whole internet was about ~20 years ago. Yeah, there may be fewer people around, but those people tend to be quiet a bit more interesting.
Why should we, as the collective west, spend soldiers lifes and money on "liberating" a population that hates us? Oh, and please mind: "Liberating" a country normally also includes killing a shitton of civilians in this process.
Flatpaks together with "immutable" distributions, Wayland and systemd are a heresy, a crime against the UNIX principles, a disgrace in the eyes of of SED and AWK. REPENT! Save your immortal core dumps and return to the one true /home !
Could we please stop calling this mediocre LARPers Nazis? My grandfather was a Nazi, party book, SA uniform and all... and he would be ashamed of the MAGAs et. al.
Absolutely! I observe this behaviour on myself: I am nowadays even sometimes coding on my phone (though, the experience is still... "suboptimal"), but for everything else? Its mostly fine.
Nah, '95 was best. BBS systems were in their final bloom, Usenet was better than everything that came afterwards (OK, the fediverse maaaay be a good successor) and there were still the COOL systems (Atari, Commodore...) around even after their respective companies had abandoned them.
You also could make some decent money if you had some rudimentary coding skills... I financed my first motorcycle (for which I hadn't a driving license, mind you) by writing a (QBASIC? Visual Basic? I don't remember) software for managing car parts for some local used car dealers.
Well, do yourself what you would expect other people in a rogue state to do. How many cries of "the Russians should overthrow the government!" were there?
Or to bring in a parable: What would you have expected from the average German citizen in 1939?
The leaders know their time is running out (especially Chamenei, which is an old man by now), and I sincerely believe that in his perspective it is much more favourable to go out on the prospect of being worshipped by his followers for a long time to come instead of doing a Saddam.
Well, look at it the other way around:
Those niche places act like a filter, pretty much alike as the whole internet was about ~20 years ago. Yeah, there may be fewer people around, but those people tend to be quiet a bit more interesting.