It weirdly didn't break every website? It said it might, but it ended up not. No idea how, or what I did. The only issue has been my room mate plays mobile games and some of those give ads for a benefit, so they can't watch those.
I'm using HaGeZi's block list (https://github.com/hagezi/dns-blocklists). Not saying it'll work for everyone, but it doesn't cause me any issues, even on the strictest one.
God I do have a weird relationship with it. I have adguard set up to block ads at the DNS level, I have adblockers on everything, and yet I spent the other night binge watching "Will it Blend?"
I'm fine with a lot, but there comes a point where it just feels... Less good than what I'm already using, and I don't see why switching is worth it, which is where I was with XMPP and Matrix. Cinny seems promising, though
I use Cheogram on mobile, and on desktop I use Dino. I've also used Conversations on mobile, which is what Cheogram is a fork of. Cheogram has some extra features I wanted. Also Movim, but on mobile I've found the general consistency to be... Bad
I use mailbox.org, and it's been good. I used tutanota for a while, but the fact that I couldn't use any email clients (they have their own now I've heard) made me switch. It's also why I didn't go with Proton, since you have to pay the $10/mo plan (I think) to do it with them.
I mean, someone has to have, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it anymore.
I have out of curiosity (take precautions, use tor, etc etc), and they're usually either a fake "1337 Hax0rs have your data" or some weird masturbate on cam with someone (that's totally not a prerecorded video!) Type of thing.
Part of the issue with reading levels is that we switched from phonics-based to uhh... Fuck what was the name, hold on...
Three cueing! That's it. With phonics you sound out the word (k-ah-t cat type thing), three queueing you... Guess based on context clues. Phonics was the standard for years, then for some weird reason three cueing took off despite producing lower literacy rates.
That... Would be interesting, yeah. There's a lot of games that do one of these (less so for the offline one, mostly idle games, but Jade Dynasty had an offline levelling system), but I don't know of any that do both
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.
Fluffy does have a separator for groups, but from what I can tell it does show all of the space group chats in there. Not a huge deal for me (I don't use a lot of group DMs on discord), but will be for some friends
Schildi I'd need to redownload to check, but it had the same look as ElementX
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.
Yeah... I'd seen some stuff with that, just didn't mention it because I hadn't looked into it too hard. The one I'm trying is a fork of a rewrite of the original server software by unrelated devs. I did try Element, but there's nothing on the server that I actually care about.
Element/Element X on mobile both seem to be missing that, and I'm predominantly on mobile for... Most chat apps now. Only exception is I do usually do discord voice calls on desktop because of push to talk. Do you know of any mobile clients that'll do that?
It did blend! Many times over the span of several hours (I watched... Most of that channel that day...)