Because they’re sexy. We’ve been over this.

So, if you study a map of a building, noticing that it has a kitchen at a certain place, then in go inside the building (without the map), and someone says “go to the kitchen,” how do you know where the kitchen is? How do you imagine the paths, rooms, hallways to follow?

I know this isn’t true of everybody with alphantasia, but what I do in this situation is I get lost. I can’t visualize walking through the space while I study the map, and I can’t bring the map to mind when I’m actually there. Some people with aphantasia have no trouble finding their way around, so I think in my case it must be that I’m missing some innate sense of direction as well that visualization might have helped me to compensate for, if only I could.

If I told you “a pink and brown dog,” you can’t “see” that dog in your mind at all?

Correct. I’m not 100% on the aphantasia spectrum, so if I think about it then I might get the briefest flash of some dog, like an afterimage at best, and I can’t hold it in my mind, or manipulate it, or see any details or color. It’s not even really a complete outline or anything either that flashes for that quarter-second.

When I read a book, I don’t know what the characters or places look like. But I have always been able to draw really well. So it’s really a mystery how this all works.

Some people can’t picture an item in their head, or can barely do so and wouldn’t be able to flip it.

If this were my grandma, then sure, I wouldn’t fault her. But if it’s someone making life-altering decisions based on their understanding of it, someone who has been doing so for a very long time, and who has support staff who ostensibly try to make sure that person understands the topic at hand, and yet after all these years of hearing about tech-related topics and deciding on them, the person — who has every ability to retire if the world is moving too fast for them to keep up, but has opted not to — asks a question as absurd as this… I actually am going to fault that person.

A couple thousand years ago German and English hadn’t even split off from each other — they were the same language.

What would you prefer people use to refer to “Reddit-like” ActivityPub clients, and what would you prefer for “Twitter-like” ones?

Great, can you explain what you mean? I did not follow.

Are you saying to start calling all of it ActivityPub? In which case, I would think that’d be extra confusing since lemmy and mastodon don’t cross-interface very well and you really need one client for each type.