#what is the alternative anyway

If you want a direct alternative there's Revolt, which is a free, open source discord clone.

Oh...

It's even worse than I thought.

Time to go back to IRC.

I recommend Element; it's very similar to Discord and has basically the same features but it's privacy-focused and both servers and DMs can both be encrypted so only the actual users of those rooms can read the messages.

This means unlike most popular chat apps, including and especially Discord, Element doesn't sell your conversations or tracking data to advertisers, because the company literally doesn't have access to that data in the first place.

I've used it for years and I think it's a natural fit for Discord users.

sighs. saves for later

The problem with this is transferring YEARS of Discord usage to these new alternatives. Until a tool is made that allows full back up if not transfer of All That, then transitioning to these alternatives isn't feasible for the baseline everyday user.

Bit of a learning curve to it, but have used this when I had someone spitefully deleting things-

https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter

Time to drop some links again.

– https://searchmysite.net/
Search engine for the indie web, personal websites, digital gardens. You can also find them in websites like Neocities, Indieweb, Blogarama, and write.as. There is also a big list of personal websites.

– https://search.marginalia.nu/
Search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and promotes websites that aren’t usually at the top of the list.

– https://www.worldcat.org/
Search engine for items in libraries (books, but also maps, articles, sound recordings, theses, etc.)

– https://scholar.google.com/
Search engine for scientific papers, reviews, etc. It’s still google, but a lot better than the normal search engine counterpart.

– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines
A list of search engines sorted by subject, area, and more. If you’re searching on a specific area, it might be worth checking if there is one focused on that area.

– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_databases_and_search_engines
A list of academic databases and search engines.

– https://tineye.com/
Reverse image search alternative to Google’s.

Also, P.S.: Please stop using Google, and start using more privacy focused search engines, like DuckDuckGo or SearchX (opensource; personally haven’t used it yet, but it looks promising for privacy-focused users)

That Google and Meta can get away with this during an era of intense misinformation and disinformation signals that we cannot rely on large tech companies to provide reliable access to information and news:

I mean, I get where this is coming from, but I also thought that “female bodied” and “male bodied” were designated shorthand that made it easier to be clear in discussions about trans people.

I can get lost pretty easily in all the terminology, can someone straighten me out here?

I think at this point the least offensive way to phrase it is ‘people with penises’ and ‘people with vaginas’.

Last I heard dmab and dfab were the best quick and snappy way to say it without all those syllables but then I always did think the whole faab/maab -> dfab/dmab, etc progression was sort of needlessly gendering, so I suppose I can’t be surprised if that fell out of use.

I just try to use whatever language trans people tell me to use at this point. Though I do wish it was a lilll bit less of a mouthful than “people with penises” and “people with vaginas”.