Of course not all 2k were active but the server definitely had a very active and dedicated core of users and we had many newbies joining almost everyday. The worst I remember, actually, was when one of our admins decided to promote the project on TikTok (for some reason) and his content was blessed by the algorithm. It was a literal meat grinder.

I’m not sure if there was even something that could have been automated. Like, of course you could automate banning raiders or spammers, iirc we had that, but what is there to automate when you’re dealing with plain xenophobia/racism/homophobia (and this was not a rare occasion)? Introducing word filters might work in some contexts but this was not the case since it was a very multilingual server. Well, server-wide filters would be useless, channel-wide filters could be helpful, though, but I doubt there is a way to implement them without bots, unless Discord introduced such capabilities.

Good to hear that a lot has now changed for the better though but it would not really improve my experience back then simply because the community of discord servers can sometimes be pretty awful. Maybe it’ll go away as Discord is getting way more mainstream nowadays but even just a few years ago it was a very specific kind of people that joined Discord and they were not always nice.

Absolutely. You can’t really search Discord communities and it is genuinely bad if you want to keep some important information for others to use. Channels were messy enough and the introduction of threads has made things even worse. I was once a moderator of a Discord server and I can say that moderation capabilities are (edit: were?) also very limited to the point where moderating a relatively active (2k+ members) server was getting a 24/7 job and we had like 7 mods(!).

I can’t grasp the whole concept of Discord servers even though I was moderating one. They’re bad as a knowledge base, they’re bad as a discussion platform, so why do people keep creating them? Moreover, why do so many open-source oriented communities (e.g. pine64) use the proprietary platform that is Discord? The only reason I see is solely the fact that Discord is very well known, and many people use it. And the situation is getting even worse: as far as I am aware Discord, which was initially created for communication between gamers, was widely used during the pandemic for online classes and a lot of development teams even use it as an alternative to Slack.

Oh, well, that’s too bad. Thank you for pointing this out!

Apparently, there is now a debloated fork “I still don’t care about cookies” but the last update was in February and the issues are all open.

Why fork?

This extension has been acquired by Avast and I simply don’t trust Avast with my data. Additionally, having it on Github allows us to improve the code and add support for websites faster.

https://github.com/OhMyGuus/I-Still-Dont-Care-About-Cookies

UPD: @nonsense@beehaw.org has mentioned a great alternative called Consent-O-Matic (MIT License)

So, let’s try to compile a list.

• “uBlock” does not need any kind of introduction. Most of the people who answered the thread use it anyway. But it is my favourite!
• “Language tool” to help me spell things properly, lol
• “I don’t care about cookies” to get rid of annoying GDPR-compliance banners
• “FoxyProxy” to easily switch between proxies
• “Vimium C” to navigate the web using vi-like shortcuts
• “SponsorBlock”. I don’t use YouTube as much nowadays but when I do, this add-on helps me skip in-video advertisements and irrelevant moments
• “Search by image”
• “Rikaichamp” is a great add-on for anyone who often needs to look up Japanese words
• “Runet Censorship Bypass” because censorship circumvention is not a crime in my country. Yet.

Honestly, I thought it will be shorter. It makes me appreciate the authors of all these add-ons even more. If it weren’t for their efforts, web browsing would be a much less enjoyable experience.

Fedora is a great and user-friendly distro but I wouldn’t really recommend it to a new user. Historically, Fedora was always kind of test site for Red Hat and it still can be considered the upstream for RHEL with all the downsides that come with upstream software. I am a Void user myself because I like its minimalist approach but it is not for people who are new to Linux. Whenever people I know tell me they want to try Linux, I usually recommend Mint (Which is a long-standing goto newbie distro, imo. It is polished enough and has a great community.), Pop!_OS (Great out-of-the-box hardware support.) and Endeavour (Polished and user-friendly arch-based experience.) to new linux users.

Indeed. One may argue that Reddit is actually a valuable source of information but to some extent this is the problem of Google promoting links to Reddit in its search. Reddit is simply a SEO-darling which uses some dirty hacks to appear more relevant to search engines and no one seems to address this issue.

Absolutely this!

I constantly feel as if my opinion is too worthless (or even plain wrong) to leave comments literally anywhere. And while it is great to know that I’m definitely not alone and there are people who feel this way, it is very sad and unfortunate that we even have to worry about it.