AllyTheProtogen

There are so many little things I want to buy just to put Linux on them lol. I've been eyeing the Fairphone 5 because the creators merged all the drivers for it into the Linux kernel and it(along with the Fairphone 4 and hopefully 6 in the future) is fully supported by Ubuntu Touch, being one of the few phones where it has a 100% support rating. Well, excluding GPS and VoLTE(although they're issues on all supported phones), but GPS just requires you to restart whatever app you're using and then it works and VoLTE has a patch incoming to fix it.

It'd be so fun to daily drive a Linux phone, since all I do on my phone is call and text and maybe browse this place and Bsky, the last two can be covered by Waydroid, which is built into UBTouch.

That is a possibility, but it doesn't work for groups or DMs, disables E2EE, and not only will your friends be talking to you through a bot, there's a chance you could get rate limited, especially if you send lots of images and videos. Small chance, but a chance

Not entirely sure. But Stoat, like Matrix, is decentralised. Although they're decentralised in the same way as Bsky is, where you can run your own instance, but things won't carry over and discoverability without noteriaty isn't exactly possible. But I think it works in their favour making it so that they can't exactly be pinned down and forced to add age verification. Not quite sure so take it with a grain of salt, but I'm semi-confident that they'll be fine.

For those looking for alternatives, Stoat and Matrix are really good choices. For Stoat, it has a really good discord feel, but ATM they're going under a rebrand(for legal reasons that aren't entirely clear as of now), and this has caused them to take down their iOS app. Though, it should be back up relatively soon. In the mean time, their website does adapt to mobile screens, so it's a good alternative until they release their new iOS app. It has voice and video calls, screen sharing(on desktop), and pretty generous upload sizes(forget the specific number, but you're actually able to send clips now, unlike Discord).

Funnily enough, when Discord revealed this awful situation, lots of people flocked to Stoat and not only crippled their servers to the point they had to disabled things like typing indicators, their email provider marked them as spam because they were sending out so many account verification emails. Everything should be relatively fine now, and should be solved by the time Discord actually rolls out age verification, as they'll have fully scaled up by then if I had to guess.

For Matrix, it is the far more privacy focused of the two. Some people(me included) might even call it a bit too privacy focused. This is because if you lose your encryption key(which, tbf, is hard to do), you lose access to all messages that were sent with that key. But either way, modern apps like Element and FluffyChat support voice calls through VoIP, pretty big file uploads, and read receipts. You'll likely miss a couple things Discord does like screen sharing, but that should eventually™. It's also completely decentralised, meaning it can't implement age verification, even if it wanted to, since someone would just create a new server for people to use, or you could just create your own for your friends to use.

Don't let Discord take your info. What they're doing isn't OK, and is meant to collect personal data, not to protect children. Yes, it'll be irritating to move to another app, let alone convince your more carefree friends to move over, but this is a huge breach of privacy, and from Discord of all people. They say they won't save your ID or other government info, but just 4 months ago, they had a data breach of over 70,000 IDs that they had supposedly deleted. That very obviously does not scream trustworthy, at least to me.

I would be far less excited about that than Tanner is, lol. I really feel like caviar is one of those foods born out of famine that managed to persist to modern day, and now rich people call it a delicacy. And you know what? They can keep it. Shit is disgusting.

Why do I have a feeling Grandpa was the one standing in the way of their dreams

Let's grab a spear

Oh yeah, definitely. I'll be watching a badass scene in a show or movie and once it's over I'll suddenly be gasping for air

I don't think so. Everything is too consistent for it to be. The overwraps on the pots and the consistency of their bodies being the biggest tells that it isn't AI, at least IMO.

Really hope it doesn't spread to the main game and we end up with a Arc Raiders situation where people are just ignoring AI use

Yeah, this is me. I love myself some pizza, but the amount of grease that usually comes with it makes me feel awful, so I just use a paper towel to get rid of it.

Honestly, FEX deserves to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. IDC what the rules are, but people went on a 17 year long search for a song based purely on a recording from a German radio station. These guys have one of, if not the most amazing stories ever, and their music is also amazing to boot.