Mastodon is mainly a way to get updates from news sites, blogs, etc.

Hm. I rarely buy ice cream in stores so I am not sure whether there is apple ice cream in stores here, but at ice cream parlors it is definitely reasonably common here.

No it wouldn't, but people would only see them if they were part of a preexisting community where such things are posted or they specifically looked for them.

On the Internet, censorship happens by having too much information for our limited time and attention span, so going after recommendation algorithms will work.

I grew up with forums where emoticons were substituted with smiley images (on badly coded ones, "8)" turned into "😎" even when it was just a parenthetical ending with the number 8 or the eighth point in a bullet point list). I use emoji approximately when I would have used those smileys, it is a good thing they're now standardized, but other than that I find them unnecessary and distracting.

yeah but that's just like your opinion man

In that case you could buy very visibly different socks from all the ones you have every time, eg blue vs white vs black vs beige. That also makes it easy to find matching pairs.

That was well below 18 for most of the time I have used the Internet. People born on that day were toddlers when I started to seriously use the Internet.

I could nowadays enter my real DOB and get through all checks but I usually still pick something in the 1970s or 1980s.

Touch, not sure. See, certainly. I have seen steam locomotives operate many times in my life because I live in a country where those are still in use as tourist attractions.

SQL is supposed to look like this: SELECT status, name FROM some_table LIMIT 5

When I was a teenager (before smartphones were widespread although they were just arriving), I was the weird nerdy kid because I spent a lot of time online and many of my social contacts were online.

Today, everyone, especially teenagers, uses the Internet a lot. I feel weird because I don't use many of those things like Instagram and TikTok and Snapchat. I don't even know anymore where to meet new people on the Internet; on forums people tended to gradually get to know the other people, but on reddit and lemmy people somehow don't tend to recognize usernames.

wasn't a thing yet when the comic was made; technology advances so quickly...

Reddit also used to be that way. FFS I think the best time on the Internet was that when we were all on traditional phpBB-style forums, where there was no "algorithm" at all (though I admit the concept doesn't scale well and they too have their structural problems).