hmm, any plans to at least fetch the latest 20 or so posts automatically? I mean rarely do people care about old discussions, but an empty community will be perceived as a bug.

Can you tell me a single open-source project that actually switched away from XMPP? Yes there are a few that switched from IRC to Matrix, but is vastly pales compared to those that sadly switched from IRC to Discord.

My very subjective user experience with Matrix: super slow and laggy messages (has improve a bit lately), the element client is a resource hog with very little actual functionality (and everything feels half-baked an buggy), and the bridges break left and right. In addition to that nearly everything is centralized on the matrix.org servers and even on those there are just hundreds of lurkers and otherwise mostly dead channels (and people that just seem to use Matrix as an IRC bouncer). If I compare that to IRC or XMPP… well those have seen better days for sure, but there are at least real people talking in the channels about topics that interest me.

and an at least equally thriving community of XMPP users… They just tend to be less vocal about it and just use it because it actually works nicely.

A PinePhone2 would likely look exactly the same, but with a more modern Rockchip SoC and maybe a different screen inside. But that is far off anyways.

Yes there might be a market for gaming oriented Android phones, but how would one benefit from that on a Gnu-Linux phone? Ok you might be able to run some Android games though Anbox, but if your device is primarily for gaming its probably better to stay on Android or get a x86 GPD-Win3 i.e. something more suitable for Linux gaming.

Not available in the Manjaro repos and they broke for good reasons. But it seems like most of these addon developers have abandoned Kodi or something like that? Seems like a not very healthy extension ecosystem (If you browse their website it looks like there a tons of extensions, but most are not installable on the latest version unless I am missing something).

You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding what IRC is. It is not something like Matrix or XMPP or Signal or whatever. It is just a convenient & standardized way to have a simple public chat somewhere. If you want you can have a simple link on your website saying “click here to join with your preferred XMPP or Matrix client”. Works perfectly fine with IRC as the base and some bridges running on the server.

Yes libera.chat does not run any [matrix] based infrastructure AFAIK.

So what would be the difference to a simple comment system? That you can give some fake internet points?

Yes you are missing the point that we are talking about the official Matrix.org to libera.chat IRC bridge which runs of course on the matrix.org servers even if you connect through it from your homeserver.

Product review blogs and those on platforms like Amazon are mostly bought. There is an entire industry with loads of people getting paid for writing fake reviews. On Steam they take a lot of effort to prevent such things and review bombing etc., and still most of the time at least the initial reviews are bought (and/or gained by proving free copies).

I don’t think a lot of games are sold by searching and filtering though game libraries. It is either because there is a game review (=advertisement) on your favorite games website, or that it is on the store’s front page (=advertisement), or that you have a friend who recommended the game to you.

KiwiIRC is no branding? That’s just a name of a software to be used by server admins. It literally would be just part of the GNU website where people easily can click, type a nickname and have a nice easy to use and convenient chat interface that almost looks like Discord.

Edit: you seem to assume people want some new chat messenger, when in reality they are fine with using WhatsApp/Signal/Discord (what ever) with their friends and just want a quick way to join a public chat room via their browser.

So you want people to find a suitable homeserver and create an Matrix account just to shortly pass by a public chat to ask some simple questions? Doesn’t seem very realistic and your argument works even better with Discord because people already have an account there in most cases.

Compared to IRC, where you can have a nice slick looking web-client that only asks a nickname and nothing more?

You sound like you haven’t used IRC for years (or maybe never?) and have no idea how it works these days.

I don’t think the Pinephone is even targeted as “stable-first” users like you seem to be. And to be honest I don’t quite get why a fast GPU with Vulcan support (which the Pinephone indeed doesn’t have) would be a relevant criteria for a phone? For gaming? (hint: there are basically no compatible games) The GPU the PinePhone has is plenty fast to drive an mobile optimized UI like seen with the Ubuntu Touch or SailfishOS ports.

If you never the less want to try out something that comes close to what the PinePhone could offer in theory, get an old UT supported Android device and use the super easy Ubports installer to reflash it.

The Samsung + AMD collaboration is about ARM chips, not x86, and likely targeting Chromebooks and maybe tablets.

Like a comment system? Exists on itch.io and the wiki I linked has a discussion page for every game.

Actual online “reviews” are full of fake reviews and such kind of nonsense, so I don’t really see the point. And as you can nearly always try open-source games for free (itch.io is usually “pay-what-you-want”), there is not that much need to get an 3rd party opinion first.

Pretty well for most type of games, but it can’t really prevent aim-bots and such things. There are however statistical methods to identify users likely using aim-bots and kick them or inform server admins.

Mozilla can’t be “bought” yet is pretty much in the hands of Google. The problem is the network structure not the legal entity running it.

There are many anti-cheat technologies used in open-source games server-side. However client-side anti-cheat can in principle never work on devices that the user has full control over (Linux), but only on locked down systems like consoles and to a very limited extend Windows (and those that exist there are basically root-kit like viruses).

A store is useful to exposing your game to a general public willing to buy your game. That works better with established platforms like Steam, HumbleStore or itch.io

What you seem to be talking about is some sort of catalogue to increase discoverability, which several exists and adding a store component to them would be hugely complicated for very little gain as you could just embed an established store widget on those pages.