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Joined 1 month ago
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Cake day: January 13th, 2026

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  • That’s part of why I still gave phone numbers and emails, despite both not being secure in any capacity; most people do have them, even if they’re not their preferred methods of communication.

    I did lose a couple of people, but they were the ones I caught up with like… Once a year, anyway. Not that I didn’t value them as friends, but there comes a point where it’s like… I’m not missing a whole lot without you here, y’know. And it’s not like I had that many friends, either, I only have a handful of people I talk to regularly. Maybe 15-20 a month if we’re including friends of people I know who I see in passing?






  • We don’t currently have another way of enforcing this sort of thing, though, aside making software paid by default. How else will you convince a company that isn’t even concerned with its long-term growth in favor of quarterly earnings reports to pay money for free software? Especially when you consider that (at least in the US) that sort of thing could get them sued by their shareholders.

    Frequently threats of legal action, backed by the ability to follow through on them, are enough to get most companies to fold, and pay. I don’t know that telemetry would be required in most cases, just because employees do talk, and usually publicly. I’m not sure if Unreal Engine does, but I can say with some certainty that WinRar didn’t, and most of their money was made through commercial licenses on nagware



  • I’ve always had a thing for tech. I used to make my own custom MySpace profiles, and pet pages on NeoPets, apply custom cursors to my PC, handled stuff when thr computer got viruses; all the stuff you’d expect of a 10 year old with an unrestricted internet access, and a love for technology. I did go to college for networking, but didn’t finish, and ended up in an unrelated field (won’t name here to avoid doxing myself, but I’m not even allowed to troubleshoot any tech to emphasize how unrelated this is).

    I did kinda… Completely drop off for a while, but the thing that got me back was my most recent anti-Microsoft kick. Completely dropped Win10 (I’d usually had a windows and Linux machine at all times), dropped Google as my email, started using omg.lol for a lot of things, etc. Then I went half-in on a computer to use as a DNS-wide adblocker, and noticed that I could do… A lot more with it, and I like to tinker, so why not do a lot more with it? 2 years later, and it’s still the best $100 I’ve ever spent tbh.










  • Someone else pointed out Cinny, which is… Pretty close to a discord replacement on Matrix, actually. Also I know Stoat mentioned a few federation options that they’d use if they ever do federate (not on the roadmap), with XMPP being the one it seemed like they’d favor.

    Also ngl it doesn’t even seem like Matrix would be a good slack replacement, unless the UI you’re using makes it more slack-like

    Re: Discord section, yeah… I liked discord at the start. It was mostly for voice calls, with a decent chat interface (based on IRC’s). Then it started getting used wildly inappropriately, which annoyed me, and then all of the horrific privacy stuff came up and it’s just… Ah. Whelp. This ship’s sinking fast.



  • Yeah, that seems to be the big issue nowadays. Doesn’t matter if your friends use Google Calendar, they can send a link and I can subscribe to it with something else. Doesn’t matter if my friends use GDrive, I have Nextcloud. But discord? I can’t talk to my friends on XMPP unless they’re also on XMPP. There are bridges, but that still requires feeding every message to discord, which defeats the purpose. Also my friends would need to be the ones to set those up, and they are not.