From an outsiders perspective, element has never worked for me and never been stable enough to get anywhere close to discord. Joining servers is buggy AF and Element X is severely hobbied on mobile.

I’ve been refusing to use discord for about 6-8 months and am often invites to join various discords by IRL friends and online communities. I wish Matrix / Element was a viable alternative but I’ve never been able to get it working for anythung other than DMs, and I’m already happy with Signal for that honestly.

As a non developer I want to be sensitive to the amount of work involves, and the number of cooks in the kitchen, but the fact that we don’t have a FOSS- federated slack / discord killer app is leaving so much interaction on the table.

I’ve heard of Revolt but it doesn’t seem to be there with encryption

Ehhhh do you have more evidence than a couple policy-specific / sycophantic tweets? I’m not sure I’d personally describe it that way

That’s great news! I guess i should switch to nightly

This type of thing (+ the AI embedded shenanigans) is what sent me over to Obsidian for personal use.

Still use Notion a bit for work but I’ve peeled way back on it.

Correct me if I’m wrong but I think we are still waiting for true tab process separation.

I love IronFox and use it alongside Vanadium. When Fission is confirmed I will bump IronFox back up to most browsing - vastly prefer Gecko browsers as a user but concerned about tab isolation and tracking.

iIRC IronFox has Fission already but there was a dangling question regarding an inability to still isolate processes.

This isn’t on the IronFox devs either - it really needs to be fixed upstream by Mozilla

We desperately need a stable implementation of fission / true tab separation on android.

Just piling on to say that I have been unable to join any Matrix servers despite having set up two accounts successfully.

And why are there no usable android clients for spaces?

Just bought a 9 for Graphene. Up and running - works like a charm. Devs are not announcing end of the line for Graphene development- they are making daily updates on their way to bringing out Android 16. At this point I’d grab a 9 rather than wait for the 10. Get yourself up and running before Google tries to lock us out of more apps - right now everything I need runs fine without any play services whatsoever. The OS is solid, Vanadium is really good - I could go on and on. If you are onboard and interested in the project its 100% worth it from where I sit.

Nothing is ever perfectly future proof

While true, I think many have been motivated to take much further action, get organized and get knowledgeable by the clear collaboration between the far right / neo reactionaries and the tech right in the US in the last decade. So basing the guide off of that will draw attention

Thanks! Yes I had intended to include links, trying again now:

https://blushresponse.bandcamp.com/album/sprawl

https://blushresponse.bandcamp.com/album/in-exile

On this note, I’ve been having a decent run with Qwant. No AI chatbot, seems to be referencing some of the big indexes but also recently partnered with Eccosia to start working on building an independent index.

Mojeek was underwhelming but I’ll try it again

Kagi was appealing to me as well, especially the quality of their results. However the requirement for a user profile (allowing them to build a profile based on your searches) and their involvement with AI soured me.

Would possibly pay for a search engine if it could somehow avoid the above pitfalls.

Joined PeerTube last month and have had great success with it in terms of as a platform and place to share art / content, though of course the views have been low.

I’m sure there is a megathread elsewhere but would love to see an acceleration of folks adopting the Fediverse. My talking point has been to sort of sell Fediverse alternatives (Lemmy, Pixelfed, Mastodon) as superior to other big tech alternatives out there (such as BlueSky and Flashes). We are either at the vanguard of a mass migration or just migrating while no one else is intending to, which I guess amounts to the same thing!