Honestly can’t disagree, it’s unbelievably polished and high quality for being free.

These are the best I’ve found that also have no trackers in them (most are in f-droid, a couple from aurora/playstore):

• shattered pixel dungeon (roguelike)
• breakout 71
• endless sky (space trader)
• pewpew live (stick shooter)
• vroomies (odd swipe racer)
• Datawing (super fun racer/timetrial drifting game, best out of all of them IMO. Not on f-droid)
• the frostrune (point and click adventure)
• ScummVM (emulator for classic point and click games, many of which are free)
• Arx Libertatis (an engine to run Arx Fatalis, though you need the OG game files, which isn’t free, but… Yarr)

I think Star Wars Kotor and Kotor 2 have android ports. Those are great RPG’s, but not free.

100%. An android device will recieve updates for 7 years in the best case scenario (on average more like 4 years), while a steamdeck is fully supported with mainline Linux, so it’ll continue to recieve support for 20 years at a minimum (support for 486 CPU’s from the early 90’s are only just now being dropped).

Honestly deserved since they union busted so hard recently.

Just gonna throw this out there; If you’ve never had a Nintendo Wii, I’d genuinely recommend picking one up and modding it.

My last console was a PS3, after that I went exclusively PC since every newer console seemed far too expensive for the very few exclusives that interested me, and they began to charge a monthly fee to play games online. The only console I didn’t have from that generation was the Wii, as I’d always written it off as a gimmick. But after taking a closer look at its library, it’s surprisingly packed with good titles, and the motion controls are a pretty unique way to interact with games.

I picked one up a few months ago off ebay, and even for a lot that included a Wii balance board, it was less than $80. Modding it was extremely easy, and after it was done, I was amazed to find that it has access to a surprisingly polished online homebrew store full of emulators and cool little homebrew games that download and install with a single click.

That means the console has access to:

• The entire Wii library (Including unique modern light-gun style games, like Deadspace: Extraction, plus Wii fit with the balance board, which is actually really fun)
• The entire gamecube library with the Nintendont emulator (best paired with either a gamecube controller or the Wii Classic controller)
• Pretty much every retro console such as SNES, Genesis, GB, GBC, GBA, etc with emulators
• The highlights of the N64 and NeoGeo catalog thanks to being ported to the Virtual Console (the Wii shop is dead, so you’ll need to sail to get those).
• You can even still play online in Mario Kart thanks to modders, and it’s still active!

All for less than $100. It’s an absolute gem of a console, especially when paired with sailing the high seas (which is really easy since the Wii has an SD card slot, so you can slam it full of stuff), and has quickly become my favorite of all time. I sold every other console I’ve ever owned, but I suspect I’ll be keeping the Wii for the foreseeable future due to its versatility and ease of use (especially for retro games, no messing around with RetroArch’s horrible interface!)

But it is possible to pick up a cheap used office PC off ebay and stick a used GPU in it, which would let someone play almost any game on the market for much less than a console.

From this page, it seems to still have problems, but I’m not sure how up-to-date it is.

It certainly was my kind of game growing up when I had a lot of free time, but even then, I wasn’t super into grinding, I just did it to get to the quests, which I very much enjoyed.

If there was a server with virtually no grinding and just quests to where I could play it essentially like an online point’n’click adventure with some combat, I’d hit it for sure. :)

I tried a couple of those a few years back, but even with the xp multipliers, it seemed like a bit too much of a time commitment :(

Uhh, no? I pointed out the good parts about it that stand out even to this day, and that I had a much higher tolerance for endless grinding when I was younger (the clear negative of the game).

Your response is leads me to believe you only read the first few words of my comment.

I played the older rune scape growing up, like a lot, it was my first MMO, and also my last, since nothing else scratched the same itch.

The draw of the game, at least for me, were two things.

One: the punishment for dying was losing all but 3 of your items, so there were high stakes that made enemy encounters kinda exciting. It was pretty unique at the time, though maybe Ultima Online had that too, not sure.

Two: the quests in run escape actually slapped. Unlike literally every other MMO on the market (which had simple fetch quests or kill X amount of things quests), Rune scape had really well written, funny, interesting quests that often played like an older point’n’click adventure, many of which gave really unique and odd rewards that you could practically use in other parts of the game.

Those just blew my wee little mind back then, and I was absolutely hooked on it. I think in particular the quests would hold up, even against modern titles.

The downside was to get to those quests, you had to grind like a motherfucker to get the required skill levels to start it. That padded out the play time by hundreds of hours, but doing it with friends or chatting while you did cooked some lobster for the 300th time made it bearable, sometimes even soothing to zone out to.

I could never tolerate the grind today like 12 year old me could, it’s unbearable, but if I could play a version of runescspe that removed the grind, I’d be tempted just to play allthe quests I never got to.

Woah! Thanks for testing that! :D

Be sure to check out that comment @[email protected]

It’s possible that the android app could be run through a compatibility layer such as waydroid, but that would need separate testing to confirm if the app is compatible.

A lot of bank apps actually work fine on Graphene, there’s a list of working ones here: https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compatibility-with-grapheneos/

Switching to a Pixel phone to access GrapheneOS would still be worth it, and a massive increase in privacy and security.

Hell yeah, thanks for donating! For anyone else reading, I’d suggest donating to PostmarketOS, if you have the means. They’re doing extremely good work building the foundation we’ll be able to use to escape Android and google forever.

Not that I’m aware of. The only Discord alternative that I know for sure is associated with Crypto is Valour.

AFAIK; the time sent, size, sender and recipients of messages, and reactions/emojis are shared across all participating servers unencrypted, even on encrypted messages.

Amdocs stopped funding it, but Martix and the company developing Element are both still made up of ex-Amdocs people. If they are connected to Israeli intelligence, it’s not as though they suddenly aren’t potential agents just because they stopped being officially funded by Amdocs.

Seems like a good time for people to stand up a new servers and invite the gaming masses.

Personally I don’t think it’s ready as a Discord replacement, based on the troubles displayed in the video, such as not being able to get things like video calls or screenshare working easily when self-hosting.

I’ve seen occasional claims of that for a few years now, yet not once have I seen any credible evidence of it.

I’m assuming you haven’t seen the GN video in the OP yet, but they go into that connection, which they personally feel is bad enough to not use it. The issue is that Matrix was created and funded by Amdocs, an Israeli company with possible connections to Israeli intelligence.

The matrix foundation themselves admit to being funded by Amdocs, such as here on their blog:

As unpopular as VC funding is in some circles, the Matrix community owes a huge debt of thanks to Element’s investors (Status, Notion, firstminute, Dawn, Automattic, Protocol Labs and Metaplanet) and Amdocs for funding over $50M of work on both Matrix and Element since 2017.

and here in their FAQ:

How is Matrix[.]org funded? For the first three years of Matrix’s development (2014-2017), most of the core contributors worked for Amdocs, who paid for them to work fulltime on Matrix. In July 2017, Amdocs considered the project to be sufficiently successful that it could now self-support and so stopped funding.

They also specifically attempt to offer their chat services to law enforcement, such as the time they bought a booth at a law enforcement convention, which caused this controversy.

The developer’s politics vs suspecting a platform may be developed and compromised by state actors are on an entirely different level.

Agh, you’re quite right. Thanks for correction. I crossed my wires and misremembered how it worked after reading this article about it a while back. Edited my previous comment to reflect that.

I suppose in theory that shouldn’t be an insurmountable problem, though in Matrix’s case it’s a big roadblock, as the main Matrix server hosted by Matrix themselves has unfortunately become the defacto main server that most people use, which means not federating with it massively reduces the ability for someone to just be able to seamlessly hop onto your server unless they too are on one of the smaller, less popular servers.

In the example given in the video, it would likely be a bit of a deal breaker if you met someone in an online game somewhere, and then invited them to your self-hosted Matrix server, only to discover they are on the main potentially israeli intelligence-tied Matrix instance, meaning you’d have to explain they need to create an account elsewhere to be able to join your instance. It would be pretty awful UX.

There is no known state or corporate connection to Lemmy or Piefed, unlike Matrix.

I have previously read that omemo 2 implementation is insecure.

It’s not insecure. The origin of that myth is this blog, however the creator deleted a response left by one of the OMEMO developers, which explained that the newer versions of OMEMO were essentially open betas, and that when a final stable release is made, only then should the client developers implement a newer version.

The Blog author’s response to deleting that comment was:

“I’ll make an edit later about the protocol version thing, but I’m not interested in having questions answered. My entire horse in this race is for evangelists to f** off and leave me alone. That’s it. That’s all I want.”

Which I think shows it was done in bad faith.

You can read a longer response I left in regards to that here, if you’re interested.

there is no one flagship app for XMPP that works cross platefrom and has all features implemented.

The Movim client is installable on all platforms as a PWA, which prevents confusion. But if you use other clients, it is true that they have differing feature support.

heck I can’t even find a windows that support voip. and their will be none.

Movim is that client. It supports Group voice/video calls and screensharing w/ audio share (a recent addition, which currently requires a chromium based browser to share the audio). Sure, it’s not a native app, but neither is Discord (it’s just another Electron app).

We need a federated solution now, otherwise we’ll all just hop to another centralized platform with all the pitfalls that brings.

As for Movim, I hate using web apps. bad user experience in general.

As the video mentions, it’s worth some inconvenience for the privacy, and currently there is no other federated Discord alternative besides XMPP and Matrix (and matrix has way too many issues to even consider, IMHO).

The community adopting Movim or supporting it with donations and bug reports will help it develop and become more polished, and there are efforts to standardize a common XMPP package platform to make deployment simpler and easier. The entire landscape for Discord alternatives all have their downsides, XMPP is the only current option that could become a long-term, permanent solution.

French MOD have deployed matrix locally for their private usage. not sure they want to use a software that the mossad can directly tap into

I wouldn’t put any stock into that as a metric of if it’s safe or not, since Spain and Germany were happy to [buy a contract for Pegasus, another Israeli surveillance software adopted widely by EU governments. The Netherlands is another suspected user.

EU governments were also happy to adopt Microsoft products despite the security implications, and even way back in the 80’s used Promis, which had a known US/Israeli backdoor in it (there’s a really great documentary about Promis on netflix, surprisingly, though I’d recommend sailing to watch it, yarr).

movim is a huge PITA to deploy yourself (especially in a container… you’re basically on your own at the moment)

Yeah, hopefully the dev or the community work on making it easier to deploy in a container at some point.

but it seems like it’s trying to appeal to discord users,

It is! But that focus is somewhat recent. The dev recently started a funding campaign to accelerate development, and just landed channels with rooms last week, so it’s still rough around the edges, but the pace that they’re implementing this stuff is impressive. They’re later going to work on having drop-in voice rooms as well.

EDIT: changed to more accurately represent how Matrix operates.

The issue is that due to the way Matrix is structured, it essentially spreads copies of unencrypted metadata to every instance participating in those rooms, So it’s federated, but difficult to actually keep metadata from being spread around even if you don’t federate with the main Matrix server, if any server you do federate with dies, it’ll get spread there. You’d have to be extremely cautious who you federate with to avoid that, or not federate at all, which defeats the purpose.

As an alternative, Movim, which uses XMPP and is also federated, does not spread meta data around like that.

Yes, many games implement that. More famously The Crew (which was mostly a singleplayer game with a large campaign with some multiplayer tacked on) became completely unplayable after Ubisoft shut down the multiplayer portion of the game due to always online DRM. They only later patched the game to become playable in singleplayer again after the extreme backlash from the SKG campaign, which focused on The Crew as an example.

There are many more singeplayer games either already killed, or currently at-risk of being destroyed. SKG keeps an up to date list of them here: https://stopkillinggames.wiki.gg/wiki/Dead_game_list

StopKillingGames is also about keeping games with always online DRM (even present in many singleplayer games today) from rendering it completely unplayable, which would also determine if it could even be sold on GoG in the future.

All of GoG’s current catalog is only possible because the trend of always online DRM wasn’t a thing yet, but going forward, we’ll need SKG to ensure GoG is able to preserve newer games as they become old. If GoG cares about preserving games, then SKG couldn’t get more in their wheelhouse. Yet they ghosted the organizer for it.

They have the opportunity to right their wrong of bailing on the StopKillingGames campaign, but they’re likely more worried about appeasing the corpo publisher more than they are defending their supposed core mission.

there would be no client for all platforms

Movim works on all platforms, already has most Discord functionality such as audio/video group calls, screen sharing with audio, and is currently implementing Discord-like spaces as we speak. It even looks like Discord.

Hey, just wanted to give you an update that the Fluxer dev actually agreed to remove the CLA!

No prob :D

Older, actually. Its been around since 2010, and is built upon the XMPP protocol, which is from 1999.

Movim has only recently taken the direction of becoming a Discord replacement.

Fluxer is doing the same thing, no email signups right now on its homepage.

It’s no different from how lemmy/piefed function. Some instances require email, others don’t. My instance, as an example, doesn’t require an email to sign up, but it does require you to write a short message as to why you’re interested in joining the server, and what communities are appealing to you. This weeds out 99% of bots or spammy users, and the handful that get through that are quickly banned.

Movim currently has so few users that the main server is trying to put as few barriers as possible to adoption, other servers can and do enable the Email requirement.

If it becomes more popular and bots or spam accounts become an issue, they could easily activate the email requirement, or even implement a system similar to what I described above. Instances that don’t take appropriate measures to those threats as they become a problem can just be defederated as they are here. It’s worked out pretty well so far.

Interesting, glad to see it’s headed in that direction in the base-spec!

They can’t retroactively close-source the older versions released under AGPL, but if it ever required a community fork to continue the last release of the GPL version, it would be a massive burden to maintain it, and could cause federation to break as the codebase diverges over time, which would create a rift in the community. You’d also have to hope that average users care enough about the license to jump ship to the GPL (probably now not as full-featured) version, otherwise the GPL version risks not being able to get enough funding to continue, or enough users to convince the larger communities to move over.

As a somewhat similar real world example, the pixel-art program Aseprite once used a FLOSS license, but it switched to a proprietary license at some point. The last GPL version was forked by the community, but it never got much traction, and is now massively behind the closed source version in features and userbase.

There’s a bit more to it than just their visual organization. In Discord, a user only needs to join a single community to access all of that community’s rooms (they don’t have to manually join each one to have it in their feed).

The admins of that community can then seamlessly create or delete rooms within that community (the users don’t need to do anything for those changes to be seen and applied on their end), and can independently adjust what the base requirements are to view, enter, or interact with each room, and then give an individual granular permissions of what rooms are visible within that community.

Not yet, unfortunately. It can currently do a group conference audio/video call, but there are no rooms where you can see who’s in the call and just hop in. That is a planned feature in the future, though. Probably after Discord-like rooms are implemented (which won a recent feature poll).

EDIT: The Fluxer dev agreed to remove the CLA!

Woah, didn’t know about that, thanks for the heads up. That’s definitely dampening my goodwill toward it.

As an alternative, I’d suggest Movim, which has no CLA, and is already federated.