Like, there are a lot of reasons to switch to linux and plenty of them are compelling. But its an absolute fantasy to believe you’re somehow immune to surveillance because you’re using the same software as Amazon’s EC2. Does anyone really believe the NSA hasn’t cracked Linux Mint yet?

It’s much harder for the government and bad actors to hide backdoors in open source software than making a deal with a private company

dismissed as a conspiracy nut.

The government and bad actors use this as a strategy to attack their opponents and control public opinion.

Protests crack down on the internet has been going on for quite some time, don’t just blame it on trump but on the whole government and its infrastructure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street

but human psychology is to blame.

I believe youtube algorithms are playing a bigger role than human psychology here.

Spreading war propaganda

None of them are good or private

I remember people arguing against russian people saying that they shouldn’t be allowed anywhere outside their country and if they are unhappy with it they should march to the cremlin. I’m gonna guess same goes for americans, right?

Calls and video chats works just fine in matrix and client like element allow you to integrate other services if you don’t like the default ones.

I’d definitely describe myself as a Discord power user

You sound a lot like someone who use windows. We are on a linux sub.

I get that there’s other things like Discord out there, but nothing works like Discord.

There’s plenty of free alternatives that works much better than discord

https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/

If linux had all these settings on installation everyone would be saying that it’s to hard for normies to install