Free Palestine 🇵🇸

What is known as servers on Discord also exists on Matrix. They are called spaces and you don’t need to self-host a Matrix server to create a space. There’s also no significant learning curve, you just download Element (the most popular Matrix client), create an account and you ready to go. You can join spaces or groups from any Matrix server or message anyone on the network. Chats also make use of end-to-end encryption by default and it can even be activated for groups (wouldn’t make much sense for public groups though).

it must be doing something right in terms of being sustainable

They’re basically living off of investor money and selling user data. The former is not an indefinite solution though. And Discord Nitro is a fucking joke, the revenue generated from it will never cover the operational costs.

Matrix is a much better solution, it uses peer-to-peer technology (https://matrix.org/blog/2020/06/02/introducing-p2p-matrix/) to reduce the burden of operational costs on the team. It’s also federated, just like Lemmy, meaning anyone can host their own Matrix server and communicate with users on other servers. Running Matrix at home or on a VPS is even easier than self-hosting Lemmy. It’s also completely free and open-source and allows everyone to write their own clients. Discord on the other side is a piece of proprietary garbage/spyware and bans everyone who attempts to use a custom client. I will never understand why so many people like Discord.

Discord is an absolute piece of garbage, it’s not a good messaging app, definitely not a good place to host a community (seriously, I don’t understand why some communities saw Discord as an alternative after the Reddit API changes), and most importantly, it’s spyware. The company doesn’t have a business model and it was founded by a guy who is notorious for creating random shit that’s not economically sustainable at all. I don’t understand why anyone would use this shit. This video outlines everything that’s wrong with Discord: https://youtube.com/watch?v=uvNkdAggUGU

Switch to Revolt or Matrix

Maybe try Startpage, it gives you Google results without exposing your data to Google.

Maybe try Startpage, it gives you Google results without exposing your data to Google.

It sends your search to google but without connecting your search with your ip.

Not true

I don’t get it either

!g sends you to the Google website, obviously Google gets your IP, browser fingerprint, etc. that way

Removed by mod

Don’t use proprietary Tampermonkey, switch to Violentmonkey

Startpage gives you Google search results without exposing your data to Google. It’s better for your privacy.

You can use Startpage to get Google search results. It’s a meta search engine for Google, but it doesn’t expose any of your data. You can use it with DuckDuckGo’s Bangs feature. That way, DuckDuckGo can be your default search engine and you can make all of your normal search queries with DDG, but if you want to search on Google through Startpage, you just type !sp followed by your search query into DuckDuckGo and it will forward your search to Startpage. This also works with many many other sites, type !bangs into DDG to get the full list of supported websites.

Am I seeing Reddit there?

I really hope no one in this community uses Google as their search engine.

Some Tailscale clients are open-source and you can self-host a Headscale server

Njalla and Kyun

Well, based Terry absolutely makes me want to move to TempleOS

What caused you to get into it

The year was 2002. I was told about Gentoo Linux by a college. I saw it as a new, shiny toy and immediately wanted to try it out. I realized that it was better than Windows, so I stuck with it. (Not with Gentoo, but with Linux. I still use Gentoo sometimes today, but I also tried out many many other distros throughout the time and I don’t use Gentoo exclusively nowadays.)

are you an evangel

Yes, I believe that Linux is far superior to Windows and I tell people about it

are you obsessed?

Absolutely

My desktop is running a nearly 10 year old install.

Oh wow! That’s truly impressive.

Another thing that helped me: Get comfortable in the Terminal. Obviously you have to learn some commands and how they work, but just configure your shell and commonly used CLI tools. It makes the experience so much more pleasant. Install a nice shell prompt, set up some aliases for frequently used commands, learn the basics of shell scripting and write your own useful little scripts for things you often have to do, maybe start using Vim and configure it the way you like it. Also explore other shells. Bash is the default shell, but there are better options like zsh or fish. You can watch this video to get some inspiration: https://youtube.com/watch?v=KKxhf50FIPI. This is actually pretty close to my shell setup. If you want to start customizing bash, check this out: https://youtube.com/watch?v=b3W7Ky_aaaY.

To continue learning, maybe subscribe to some Linux-oriented YouTube channels. DistroTube makes great videos about Linux, tiling window managers, how to use various commands, how to configure your shell environment, etc. He also reviews many Linux distros or explains why free software is important. If you search any Linux-related topic on YouTube, chances are that DT already made a great video about it.