Disdain for an entire country of diverse people based on the (stupid, bad) actions of the minority in power is a bit much…

complete feature parity isn’t a good goal, or the alternatives will always be behind. Partial parity, with some features Discord doesn’t have (e.g. E2EE) is an achievable goal which does successfully encourage migration

I’ve been using it as my only form of messaging with most of my contacts for several years, many of whom have little knowledge of technology. It’s really not.

Yup, that’s what DMA should solve (edit: or, rather, will solve, when Whatsapp fully complies with it)

depends what you mean by closer – by features and ease of use, Matrix is the closest you can get to Whatsapp right now. XMPP is good, though!

ah, hopefully with the Digital Markets Act in the EU, reliable bridging to Matrix with E2EE intact will come quickly. You can already bridge (e.g. I run mautrix-whatsapp), but its not in an ideal state

Matrix!

Machine Unlearning is a very active field right now but basically no not really

The world doesn’t (need to) run on giving only what you owe. People donate to creators not through moral obligation, but because they like what the creator has made and they want to reward them for it and/or enable them to make more of it.

Why do you think Patreon (and others) is so popular? Any cynic would surely point out that from a purely transactional outlook, the donors are getting a bad deal. And yet.