That’s the main thing I hear. I don’t post anything I care about. I’ve had CTOs I’ve had other engineers.

When you paid a few 100 dollars for games you want to play and proton doesn’t support them. You keep using Windows

While I agree with feeling a bit off , Fluxor seems closest to feature complete. Overall what Stoat has an offer works well. They are updating their infrastructure and so Fluxor.

The Matrix and XMPP are still all over the place. Unless one client comes out to rule them all. And none such really take the crown.

Honestly If there is issues with LLM it might be better to stick with Stoat.

Can be a real mess sometimes. I’ve had issues with performance and time outs

Browser I’ve been using Librewolf for over a year.

Helium also looks promising for a browser but it’s Chromium based and I’m not a fan of Chromium.

For search I’ve been using StartPage. I don’t believe they are open source but Quant I believe like GoDuckGo are using Bing and I think Bing is absolute trash.

If you don’t mind paying there is Kagi but personally I don’t think the search results have been better than GDG.

There is no flawless solution , that being said there is such thing as worse and even worse … to me Reddit is “even worse”. I’m only accountable for what I post and what I “vote” on and there I’ve got no problems. It’s nice to know here if there are trackers it’s not necessarily baked in. LLMs maybe reading what it can see but those LLMs aren’t determining how and what I’m doom scrolling. That’s what would bothers me.

And while I’m sure there are bad actors probably willing I still think the fediverse is to small to really garner a ton of effort to extort much of anything.

Movim looks insanely promising. I’ll have to check it out after I get off work. I’ll have to update my write up if it’s that impressive. Curious how it will handle from what I understand XMPP is protocol like matrix yes ?

Services like Discord allow you to keep an always on chat channel. People can join and leave as they like and no one is disrupted. Matrix is more like Skype/Zoom you create a call or session. But there is a person host. Once host leaves the call ends. In some cases you need to invite people to join the call.

For me Fluxer is technically more feature complete with steaming options. But banners and custom emojis are behind paywalls. (Non local hosted)

Stoat offers free banners, emojis a nice UI even a community browser! Its voice chat works well enough but no streaming features. Stoat is purely donation based at the moment.

Sounds like Fluxer is gaining momentum mainstream wise. I’m happy with either option …

My dudes and dudettes , I’m blown away by the response. I’m going to be busy trying them all out. Thank you for the responses and I hope others found some good insight!