• Terrible format for archiving knowledge
• Terrible tool for retrieving knowledge
• Locks community access behind a corporate license agreement
• Hands control of community-created content to a corporation
• Prevents indexing by web search engines
• Antithetical to interoperability
• Privacy-hostile

A web forum is far better in most cases. If you can’t manage to run your own, there are plenty of lemmy servers that will do it for you. Even an email list (with searchable archives) would be better than Discord.

If you have collaborative documents that outgrow the forum format, use a wiki.

If real-time chat is needed, irc or matrix.

A project hosting its community on Discord is a project that won’t get my contributions.

By the way, please don’t write regex to try to validate email addresses. Seriously.

Amen.

There are libraries for that; some of them are even good.

Spoiler alert: Few of them are good, and those few are so simple that you might as well not use a library.

The only way to correctly validate an email address is to send a message to it, and verify that it arrived.

Keybase was popular with some Hacker News users for a while, but now that it’s owned by Zoom, anyone concerned about privacy ought to think twice before using it.

XMPP might be worth considering if you’re hosting for yourself and all your contacts. I suggest avoiding it for public use, mainly because features are piecemeal and coordinating them across everyone’s clients and servers is a bit complicated. (Also, I don’t know if there’s a good XEP for encrypted search.)

Correcting some misconceptions…

Element for Android doesn’t support searching in encrypted channels

That’s true of regular Element for Android, but it’s being replaced with Element X (which is built with Rust). I would expect search to be added there if it isn’t already.

and I think you can’t use E2EE in the browser at all(?)

I have done it in Firefox, so that’s false. Perhaps you had trouble with a specific browser?

plus basically every other client has even more drawbacks when it comes to E2EE.

Nheko handles E2EE just fine, so that would seem to be false as well.

Since you’re looking for recommendations, it would help if you said which clients you tried and what problems you had with them.

In case you haven’t seen it, you can set a Features: E2EE filter on this list:
https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/

I bought one during the clearance sale for the price of shipping, assuming that it would be abandoned but maybe still useful as a low-power linux server. I guess I ought to set it up and take advantage of it.

Thanks, Valve, for not letting these things become instant e-waste.

Any reason why I shouldn’t just go with Debian + KDE and install Steam?

No reason to avoid Debian unless you have hardware so very new that it requires the very latest kernel to operate.

If you go with Debian Stable, you can enable Backports for a fairly recent kernel, currently 6.5.10. You could go with Testing or even Unstable if you’re addicted to upgrading as often as possible, but chances are you won’t need to.

I’m gaming on Debian Stable with Steam in a flatpak. It works great, and is blissfully low maintenance.

At some point, you’ll probably run into people claiming that Debian is bad for gaming performance because of “outdated” packages. In most cases, those people don’t know what they’re talking about. I suggest ignoring them unless they identify a specific performance issue that actually affects you.

It’s simple: My SSD can only fit so many 100-300 GB games, while I already have hard drives with plenty of free space.

(Also, running Linux means that an SSD doesn’t help game performance much anyway, outside of initial loading time.)

You can get a 2TB M.2 for around $100.

More like $150-200 if you want a good one.

If you’ve got the specs for new games, there’s no excuse.

What a very privileged perspective. I don’t have much money, but most new games are playable on my existing hardware if I tune the graphics settings. I would rather spend what money have on things like food and heat. (Or if the basics are covered, then maybe a newish game.)

Do services count? Because in that case, ride-hailing. A replacement for services like Uber and Lyft.

I have a lot of criticism for The Witcher 3, but one thing I really appreciated was making lore and character background available for reading. It really helped with this newcomer’s understanding of the world and story. (And later, with my understanding of the TV series.)

So… it’s not Starcraft, then.

I think Starcraft has enough story and character development by now that its identity is more than just the mechanics that it started with.

It’s just another game.

It would still be a Starcraft game. If we were to ignore the lore and only consider the RTS format, then even the first Starcraft was “just another game”. Those mechanics weren’t unique or new.

Similarly, World of Warcraft is still a Warcraft game, even though it’s hung on a different framework from the original.