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Could someone smarter than me explain Matrix to me? In particular,

• What would be the utility for someone, who cares about privacy and currently uses Signal and email for communication?
• What advantage would it give me over other services?
• Is Matrix anything good already, or is it something with potential that's still fully in development?
• How tech savvy does one need to be to use Matrix?

I've been using Fennec. Any one got advise on what would be the best alternative? And please explain why.

Now could you explain it like I'm 104?

shorts are not my cup of tea. Pretty sure shorts have a negative impact on peoples attention span. I'd still be happy to see people watch their shorts on the Fediverse rather than at tiktok/yt. Of course, but still....

Yeah I agree with you. To be fair, they could be a Mossad-front to any degree and I wouldn't be able to tell. So I won't claim anything with certainty on the subject. The world is a fucked up place and the Middle East particularly so.

Which is a shame because it's a beautiful part of the world with a beautiful cultural heritage. I myself have been having a lot of fun experimenting with Islamic geometry after reading a book (and guide) on it by Eric Broug. I also dived into some (extensive) Sufi poems like the Masnavi and the Conference of the Birds, and I feel like these taught me many things. What surprised me was that many of the wisdoms shared in them would appear to me as Buddhist rather than Islamic. Never ever heard of that side of Islam before, but I can highly recommend them. The latter poem I read in a publication that came with Persian miniature illustrations, which are of incredible beauty. I feel like in the West we often lack respect for the beauty of near-eastern culture. Here in the Netherlands the biggest political party is anti-islamic, and I feel like many people can only see the Near-East as a terrorist warzone, not the place of beauty and culture it is just as well. I'd be the first to admit that religion can be a horrible force of oppression in the world, and being an atheist myself I tend to encourage criticism of it. But when you criticize others without knowing the slightest thing about them I don't think that's particularly helpful.

(nothing that you said asked for the last paragraph, but I just felt like sharing it ;-)

I guess there's the Sunni-Shia divide that's of interest here. Iran (shia) is Israels arch-enemy. Al-Qaeda (as well as it's offshoots like ISIS) is led by Sunni jihadists. They too are generally considered enemies by Israel, but in the grand scheme of things they are (currently) a much smaller threat than Iran and it's allies. Al-Qaeda and Iran themselves are each others enemies, and since 'the enemy of your enemy is your friend', Israel sometimes benefits from the presence of Al-Qaeda. They formed a sort of buffer for them. This report tells us Israel was treating Al-Qaeda fighters wounded in the Syrian civil war. So it's very clear that Israels and Al-Qaeda interests sometimes align. Were Al-Qaeda ever to become more powerful than Iran is, then Israel would obviously shift their focus, since a powerful Al-Qaeda would also be a clear threat to them. Any pan-islamist organization would deem the presence of Israel on the Levant a blemish. Israel is often seen as a sort of colonial state that treats their Muslim population as second class citizens at best. The biggest threat to Israel would be Muslims uniting under any one pan-islamist flag, so Israel has a vested interest in division so they play the divide and rule game. All this is not to say though, that Al-Qaeda is a Mossad front. Their actions can be explained by their interests sometimes aligning, so according to Occam's razor we shouldn't rely on the assumption of them being a Mossad front. We don't need that assumption to explain what we are seeing. AFAIK there hasn't been any proof of the theory. This PolitiFact article looks into the Hornet’s Nest-theory, wherein US and Israel created ISIS to sow division in the Middle East, and PolitiFacts deems it an unfounded conspiracy theory.

Discalimer: not an expert in any sense, just my best take.

I followed in 2021. What remains is that I use YouTube quite a lot (even though it's through piped or yt-dlp).

ListenBrainz

entomological

Entomology is the scientific study of insects, a branch of zoology. source: Wikipedia

Phonetic transcription exists for a reason. The comments here are full of "this is pronounced as this". Which isn't very helpful.

Is there any particular hate against 'live, laugh, love' that I am missing, besides the phrase just being a bit cheesy?

Sabotage Wikipedia, Ddos the Internet Archive. Makes you wonder if in the future we're going to forget our past. Will actual history be obscured in a sea of alternative histories unrecognizably presented as the same thing. Maybe we need to keep some books laying around in archives just to be sure.