Not the person you responded to, but I also generally prefer Krita for GIMP-y/Photoshop-y tasks, though I am by no means an expert photo-shopper, just an amateur.

Krita has most of the necessary tools for photo editing, especially as it now comes with the G’mic tool pre-installed (it can be added to GIMP as a plugin, too), which is incredibly powerful, and has features such as a fantastic heal/object removal tool called Inpaint (shown here in GIMP, but the same process is used in Krita), as well as a quite good alternative to Adobe’s Magnet Select tool called Extract Foreground.

GIMP has a different heal tool plugin available called Resynthasizer that I think is a little quicker to use, but from what I recall didn’t give quite as good a result compared to the G’mic inpaint (though much better than Krita’s non-G’mic heal tool, which gave the worst results).

There’s more tutorials on different G’mic functions here, which really shows off how capable of a toolset it is.

The new text tool is huge, since the old one was naff to use. This new one is a game changer for me.

It took me a bit to figure out how to make a call (definitely bad UX). What got it working for me was adding the other user as a contact (beyond just messaging them, it’s like a different thing), and then making sure they also added me as contact, and each person accepted that contact request, then the call button seemed to show up, and the call worked fine, even video.

Movim in particular is the most suited for a discord replacement in the XMPP space, as the dev implemented discord-like channels with rooms. It also has group video calls and screensharing with audio (must use a chromium browser for now to share the audio).

It is still clunky compared to Discord, but that generally applies to most of the alternatives 😅

Matrix has a lot of problems, some of them inherent to its design, including leaking metadata of encrypted messages to any server that participates in a chat room (this metadata includes the time the message was sent, size, sender and recipients of messages).

I personally think Movim is the better option that’s actively federated, while Fluxer is also promising if it successfully implements federation as well.

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 :(

For secure messaging that isn’t centralized and doesn’t require a phone number, I’d suggest Delta Chat.

it’s very clear we have to escape Android and Google entirely, there is no other option.

Please donate to PostmarketOS if you have the means, it gives us a true alternative that is completely community owned, it just needs our support to become polished and to add support for more phones.

We have to support software that’s still made for us. While we still can.

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.

1.6 and 4.6 million people is an extremely small population

Respectfully I have to disagree there.

As the population scales up a centralized government is inevitable because the system has too many moving parts.

I haven’t found that to be the case in my research. Decentralized modes of society appear to scale very well as long as it is combined with federation.

To make any of this happen globally, or even just a country, you have to rely on all people behaving differently than they have for the past several thousand years. Human tribalism, selfishness, and greed were a problem way before capitalism was a thing.

While hierarchical oppressive societies have been prevalent for the past 8,000 years, new evidence shows that before that, the norm for humans were egalitarian societies, so our current path is quite an aberration from that norm. If you’d like to delve into that research yourself, you can read it for free here.

1930’s Catalonia and Rojava are very solid evidence that with the right societal structure, we can actually bring out that latent egalitarian ability of humans. People who lived through what happened in Catalonia described there being a period of acclimation to the concept of things being free, yet only taking what you need, but that once people understood that there would be more waiting for them later, they quickly adapted to living in a post-scarcity fashion. There’s a good documentary on that topic here, if you’re interested.

Are you involved in Anarchist movements to know that to be true? Because it sounds like FUD to me.

An extreme minority, perhaps, but it hasn’t been a mainstream anarchist position for a century. And accepted Anarchist theory has never in all of its history advocated for lawless chaos.

Out of curiosity, what is your own personal political worldview?

There were roughly 1.6 million participants in Anarchist Catalonia. More recently, Rojava (Kurdish Syria) has successfully operated on a decentralized/federated system heavily inspired by Anarchist theory, and that had a population of 4.6 million, with no major internal issues or strife.

Anarchist theory is, in my opinion, one of the best defenses against Cluster B people getting in positions of power. Under a centralized government, a bad actor has tremendous power, and there is often limited options for a population to counter that corruption, since it is often self-reinforcing by the system itself. As an example, to corrupt the US, corporations need only bribe a few hundred senators, and then can effectively implement self-serving laws that reinforce monopolies of power.

In a system with decentralized power where the community itself is the bedrock of power, how does an outside force effectively corrupt it? They can bribe a community’s delegates, but those can be immediately removed if corruption is perceived by the community. To make any headway, they would effectively need to bribe an entire community, which could be thousands of people, and those people would have no incentive to take those bribes if the bribe was to prop-up something detrimental to that community.

Because every position of power has so little power in a decentralized community, a Cluster B personality would have very little ability to cause damage compared to a centralized system.

Also, bear in mind that according to studies, only about 1.6% of the population has a Cluster B personality. The reason they are able to wreak so much havoc is pretty much entirely due to having centralized governments, as well as an economic system that rewards and empowers cluster B behavior, both of which work synergistically to result in the worst possible outcome for the majority.

For an Anarchist society to flurish long-term, it would also need to eliminate capitalism almost immediately, and instead replace it with universal basic rights to food, housing, healthcare, and public transportation, alongside a library and gift economy, reinforcing a society built on mutual aid.

If you’d like to see how that sort of world would look like for an average person, I’d highly suggest reading The Dispossessed.

Anarchist theory ensures power comes from the bottom up, instead from the top down. If a community wants to participate in a wider federation of other communities, they may elect delegates to perform duties on their behalf, but critically, they can be recalled at any time if they are unsatisfactory in their duties to the community. There’s also a strong emphasis on delegation, not representation. This ensures that if corruption does begin to occur, it can be eliminated quickly, and ultimately the power to do that lies with the people who would be most effected by it.

This can even be implemented militarily, as it was done during the Spanish Civil War to good effect.

That is the entire purpose of Anarchism; to remove hierarchies and instead implement a truly horizontal and egalitarian society. This was put into practice in Catalonia in the 1930’s, and from all historical accounts we have of that period, it was extremely successful. There’s also some great books on that period that goes into detail of how it operated, such as this one.

It did exist, it’s just that in the past, the real socialist revolutions were crushed by the authoritarians.

Feel free to! :D

Might wanna take this one down, OP. The Devtoolkit_api user is just an AI bot spamming bitcoin scams along with this random stuff.