If you don’t need voice, there are a lot of options. Matrix has IRC support and encryption, and has voice options if you self host.

Riot is… A Discord clone without working voice and I found it to be an odd duck.

There’s RocketChat… More Slack like.

Mattermost.

I replaced my voice/video chats with Nextcloud Talk and/or Steam, based on the scenario. Outside of those, Matrix is good for community needs in my mind.

We interacted on the internet for years without discord.

It is far from essential.

Most of the american companies are using Chinese manufacturing for much of the devices. Fairphone is European, but same manufacturing sources.

In 2026, as a Canadian… Choosing between a country that is adopting nazi practices and threatening us with annexation, and one who has a questionable history but is overall doing more for climate change and global stability right now than the other… The choice is easy. Anything but american.

Sure, but then you are also not funding Google’s competition in order to help improve choice.

Buying second hand might make you feel better because you didn’t directly fund Google, but you’re still helping them maintain their position.

The Graphene devs explicitly only support Pixels. Sticking with Graphene means continuing to give Google the profits from your hardware.

/e/OS is not bad as an alternative. The system wide ad and tracker blocking is nice.

Seriously. Neurodivergent folks like myself stand an iota of a chance of being successful with a cubicle. Open floor plans are an assault on our senses and the wet dream of micromanagers. They are awful and the reason I exclusively work from home.

Snaps should put them in F tier.

You’re mixing the Signal Foundation up with the original creator of Signal who has stepped down and is no longer involved… And is off…

checks notes

Building fucking AI bots apparently? Thank goodness he’s not involved with Signal anymore.

Same!

In Canada, the only province that historically has a rate that high is Ontario, and that is because they use Nuclear power, which is more expensive to maintain, and also they have no protection laws for consumers. So residents of Ontario pay what the US companies are willing to pay for power.

The neighbouring province, Quebec, uses primarily Hydro Electric dams, and has protection laws that restrict pricing for hydro power for residents of Quebec to a reasonable margin above cost, regardless of what the US is willing to pay for the power.

When I lived in Ontario, the price was $24c/kwh, while Quebec was $8/kwh

Ontario has had new laws passed with the energy board and now it appears their price is down to $14c/kwh according to this site, but I’m willing to bet that is highly dependent on surge pricing. Getting straight answer on costs is difficult these days with all the tiered pricing.

Apparently Alberta is more expensive than Ontario now… Must be all that “freedom” they have… Did they privatise electric in addition to everything else there? I’m not familiar with how their grid is powered… Maybe its oil/coal based. Which would be unsurprising.

Every banana in existence is in this picture.

Anyone contributing to open source either does it:

• on their companies dime, which means they work for a rare company building open source solutions
• at the end of their day, on their weekend, or during their vacation

Most FOSS devs are in position two. By a large margin. They could be relaxing, or earning more money doing freelancing to make ends meet, but instead they are trying to build something they want to see happen. That requires focusing on the important tasks and that often means not having time to spend on poorly reported bugs that are actually users just not RTFM and opening issues. It wastes the devs time, and projects with too much of this have development stagnate and are frequently shuttered.

And devs that just do this to get a better job stop contributions once their new job takes over their life, and then the project suffers.

Users need to appreciate FOSS devs more because some of the most important projects we need in 2025 are developed only because they want to see them happen.

Oh, go to your DDG options and turn the AI slop off.

Don’t use Google. DDG works with keyword searches and you get exactly what you expect.

For horribly inaccurate results that sound like they were written by a $5 SEO article writer.

Ill stick with key word search and skipping over all the SEO crap for.real results.

I highly encourage avoiding Shop(ify) as the owner is trying to start a Project 2025 mimic project in Canada.

What kind of twatwaffle writes this crap. Fuck your planned obsolescence.

Please don’t.