Tech people, have mercy!
Trying to exist in the indie web or FOSS community is so difficult as a person who has an incredibly limited scope and knowledge of technology, web development etc - mainly because of the certain types of people who seem to speak the loudest (and in some cases are the only ones who speak).
To give an example from today, I was replying to a post on mastodon with a list of some well-known free or cheap indie web blog hosts to get people to try giving microblogging a go. I mentioned Neocities as it is a very popular blogging platform, community and - dare I say it - not bad for beginners. Of course this mention was met with a disgruntled reply by a tech dude explaining to me how their "rate limit is bad", their "strict restrictions on file extensions" and something about AJAX and third party sites.
My guy... I have no idea what any of that is. So of course I replied courteously because I know mastodon is full of tech people so it may not have even crossed this person's mind that I may not know much about tech. I mentioned that yeah they may not be the best but it's a nice place someone with no tech knowledge like myself can start and they can always migrate their site somewhere else once they learn more about blog hosting and web development.
But this dude just kept going?? About how he's been coding since he was 7 and "it's AJAX now but what's next? JavaScript?" and complaining that Neocities is trying to incentivize their paid plan. MATE. I STILL DO NOT KNOW WHAT THOSE ARE. I, unlike you, have not been coding since I was 7. And they never made any attempt to recommend something else, or say which of the services I provided they prefer. And no other person witnessing this who knows what's going on says anything.
And someone might say this is anecdotal but I've had and seen this happen time and time again. In reddit threads as I search for guidance on privacy or to fix some bug, in comment sections of guides or review videos, it's never-ending. I thankfully have a level of tech literacy and know people who know what they're doing, but this is so discouraging - let alone to people who might want to get involved in more ethical tech consumption and use but have absolutely no compass.
For that reason I do genuinely hope this is just me.