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What viable user-friendly (i.e. no account creation required) options are there? I just want my messages between friends and family to not be mined by greedy corporations.

If not this browser, which one should we use if we want privacy?

I personally don’t really care for this change, but it would have been nice - although I understand it would have taken significant time/effort to develop that could be used in other areas with the limited resources - if there was some criteria to create a selection of instances that would be randomly selected based on something like:

1. instance age - Your instance must be active for N months/(years?) to qualify to ensure rando spawns that may die a week later don’t impact users, as well as being able to track the next rule:
2. instance reliability - If there is a way to track this, only include instances that meet a specific number and maintained it for the last N months. It would suck to throw users into an unreliable instance, or one that started off great but started going south in the last 3 months.
3. same server rules and privacy policy - To ensure a “family friendly” set of default instances that people could easily join without having to overthink it.

Not sure what else they could track, but those three would be a good start, though admittedly a lot of additional work.

I’ve read from SME’s that Signal is the gold standard for encrypted private messaging. I haven’t seen that claim of any other messenger. What are the alternatives?

I’ve tried Briar and that seems like it may be good in 5+ years, but not something I’d ask non-techy people to use in its current form. Sessions dropped Perfect Forward Secrecy because it was too hard to make it work. I don’t want security features dropped just because they’re “hard” so that’s an immediate no from me. What are viable alternatives that don’t leak metadata?

The way I did it was getting rid of the apps I no longer wanted on my phone. This forced people to send text messages. If they try sending a good pic/video it would obviously fail. Their only option was usually something more difficult than just installing Signal. I don’t provide Whatsapp as an alternative. I did lose some contacts, but close friends/family will obviously opt for the better messaging experience compared to default SMS.

Revolt is a great alternative to Discord, although I personally am still rooting for Matrix/Element in the long run.

I’ve got my vote for the guy who thought carbon fiber would do great under pressure after being told “no” by tons of experts in the field.

Adding a user’s @user@domain.com in a comment is - to really simplify it - just like sending them an email. The bot get a message that you posted something, it process the message and “emails” you back at that time.

@remindme@mstdn.social in 1 hour

The real “LPT” is always in the comments: Spray your hand and rub it on like regular sunscreen.