The call to action button is the free plan, with subscribe having a secondary button style. That alone makes it clear they want to show you ads more than they want you to subscribe.

If you go to very leftist areas of the internet (socialist or communist areas, anywhere from anarchistic (bottom left) to authoritarian (top left)) you’ll see people using liberalism by its political science definition, rather than the definition its taken on within American culture. It stems from the idea of capital moving freely (that is, liberally) without restrictions. You’ll also see it referred to as neoliberalism in the same spaces.

Full disclosure, I myself am pretty extremely socially libertarian (arguably borderline anarchistic), and have used liberal derogatively myself.

I’m also still interested in the xmpp vs matrix debate. I’m using matrix ATM because it seems more actively developed and used, but I know some people still swear by xmpp. Ultimately I really just want a decentralized alternative to discord, but beyond that I feel like I’ll just want to go to whichever alternative has the most users, since that’s pretty useful for chatting software.

I’ve heard feedback that matrix doesn’t seem to be very united, with different groups implementing different competing features proposals etc., which does seem to be a pretty big issue.

I’m also pretty optimistic about a lot of the new stuff being built on matrix. I recently became aware of Commune, which is about making sections of matrix servers web searchable, and that sounds incredible - one of my biggest issues with discord is how often it gets used as effectively game wikis, collecting all these guides and information that’s only accessible through a proprietary discord account. No anonymous search.

I haven’t gotten into vrchat personally, but I love that it’s become well known as a good safe place for people to explore their gender identities

A ttrpg called .dungeon got a remaster recently and I keep coming back to one of the screenshots on the store page, because I’m such a big fan of the rules for community moderation it enumerated: