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this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2024
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Read it again...
I refuse to believe there exist two pieces of software that are truly for all intents and purposes identical, unless one is a very recent fork of the other.
Both Lemmy and Ladybird are very pointedly not forks of anything.
Which is unrelated to their point, which is that visible popularity of a piece of software (e.g. having many downloads in an app store) has a large impact on likelihood of people to trust it.
You feigning ignorance at this just discredits your own position. Their question was essentially rhetorical, and you chose to answer it incorrectly rather than concede their correct point:
If you encountered 2 identical pieces of software, you would trust the one that is more popular, thus proving that popularity is a meaningful benefit to a piece of software.
Of course not. I would do my research, like any responsible consumer.
I'm a programmer. Which libraries I pick to add to my project have effects on everyone who will use the software I publish. I owe it to them to do my homework to compare them and figure out what the differences are and which one is better for my use case. If I just picked whichever one was most popular, I could have a polyfill.io incident on my hands every week.
I do the same thing with software I personally use, because I'm a responsible consumer. Firefox and Chrome aren't identical. Chrome has way more downloads but I'm betting more than half the people in this thread use Firefox or one of its derivatives, like Mull or Librewolf.
I dream of a world where doing your homework when choosing software to learn is not so rare that people assume no one does, and accuse those who do of lying.
But when it comes to most people out there, we're not in that world right now, and popularity does matter, so boosting shitty devs' products is harmful to the FOSS ecosystem. HTH
I mean, you can deny the premise all day long, but it will never win you an argument.