The post here is a link to an online survey being done by the Signal Community. Users need to follow the link to answer the survey if they wish (but it means creating yet another new account which I'm getting pretty tired of as I'm now passing over 900 different logins all with unique passwords etc ;-)

It can be self-hosted as well so that server is not essential to the service...

That was the instance I signed up at, about 10 mins before I posted this link. Lemmy also went down in the last day, so nothing is bulletproof. But the site is working as I'm browsing and commenting right now.

Brave Search

Yep good advice, some services have no investment value loss e.g. short term insurance, life insurance, etc. You can switch elsewhere for a cheaper rate and lose nothing.

Unless you have a family or dependants, I'd cut out life insurance and focus on the essentials for now to recover. I also learn long ago to pay my credit card off every month to not have to pay interest on it..

The bigger problem was a massive buy of Microsoft Cloud services with Office365 etc. It's moved beyond the desktop and moving back is not going to be easy. MS cloud makes it's easier to use Linux on desktops, but basically the horse has left the stable.

That's a wide open topic, but for self-hosted I use FreshRSS with Full Text RSS coupled to it to get the full text of feeds. For desktop, I like cross-platform open-source Fluent Reader (just did a video about it today in fact) - again because it pulls in full text and can still sync reading progress across devices through multiple services inc FreshRSS, Nextcloud, and others.

Anything with a "Foundation" or a "Board of" behind it, seems to get lobbying rights to veto any changes, i.e. to preserve their status quo ;-)

Supposedly too, you used to be able to commission a "research project" and define it's scope nice and narrow, and get just the results you'd like to have published to support the "no change". It does take a lot of money to be able to do this, though.

I'm not sure RCS is yet complete enough. It was really designed with replacement of SMS in mind. It also needs to work independently of any phone number and ensure full E2EE.

Yes me too. Without Linux, basically nothing else runs in my house!

For me, it was much like iPhone vs Android. I've twice been back to owning an iPhone and have kept leaving because of the more closed ecosystem. The freedom to explore, take apart, modify, hack, learn, etc. I don't do a lot of that, but it is nice to try things out. So in summary for me its the philosophy behind it, and I can install it freely across all computers, Pi's, etc in the home.

EDIT: I forgot I'd also bought Vista at the time, and it was not great. I vowed after that not to pay for another Windows OS.

That yes but I also discovered the quality of floss makes a big difference. I always used to choose cheapest until I discovered wax coated floss that really made a world if difference. No more breaking, shredding, stuck floss.