Limerance

Public key cryptography and signatures are common technologies nowadays.

It is possible to build an age verification system, where you use your actual ID with a cryptographic process without any personal data. The technology has existed for decades now.

As a user the license doesn’t matter for you. Even if you contribute back to a project, you will be able to use your changes in the project.

The license only matters if you want to redistribute a changed version yourself or use parts of it in your own software.

I go no ads. Using Firefox and Ublock Origin.

Make real backups. Ideally make two or more

• a full disk backup with SuperSuper
• A Time Machine Backup on an external drive

The likelihood of making your machine unusable for a while is non negligible.

Mac

If you want to dual boot with macOS, do some research. Boot loaders and EFI can be tricky.

Holding alt after pressing the power button gives you the option to choose the drive to boot from. Holding cmd + R after pressing the power button allows booting into recovery mode. It allows you to partition and format your internal drive and reinstall macOS.

You can install a newer version of macOS than is officially supported using OpenCore Legacy Patcher.

FOSS principles

Intel Macs often have Broadcom WiFi chips, that need proprietary software to work. As a noob, you should got with a distro that makes it easy to install these or does it automatically for you.

You likely also want to play some video files, so you will need nonfree stuff.

Distro hopping

Install to an external drive or Virtual Machine. You can do that on your existing macOS with VirtualBox for example.

similar to Windows, macOS, customizable

Even the desktop environments, who claim to be macOS like (Endeavour, GNOME), have at best a superficial similarity. Don’t expect a macOS replacement. All desktop environments are different from macOS.

beginner distro

Fedora and SuSE are not beginner friendly. Lots of Linux distros use the same marketing terms of easy to use, powerful, efficient, etc.

Start with Ubuntu or something based on Ubuntu like Mint.

Cinnamon, KDE, and Gnome are all good desktop environments for beginners.

There are alternative App Stores in Europe for iOS. So far they haven’t been very successful, because of Apple‘s interference. They do exist and are growing.

The account did appear to be banned on Wednesday and Thursday. However, late Thursday afternoon Eastern Time, Owda’s account appeared to be restored, but restricted. Some content seemed to not be available, and a banner appeared at the top of her feed that read: “Posts that some may find uncomfortable are unavailable.”

The account is back evidently.

Downvote should not be a disagreement button.

Churn is an issue you mentioned.

I was specifically thinking about men who have sex with men. Grindr and similar platforms are very successful. Most of it is about casual sex between promiscuous men. They are also a great target group otherwise. Travel between gay metropolises is common as. Pride tourism is big.

Local network effect is enough, even when it’s restricted to a specific demographic or subculture. Once a dating platform grabs a hold in a location and demographic, it can extend from there.

Of course to keep a project like this running, you need a way to pay for hosting and development.

Statcounter is running on more than a million websites. They track user metadata across these websites.

While this doesn’t give you absolute numbers for everything, it should be enough to notice trends.

Their methodology is on their website.

You’re better off with a seedbox or a service like put.io

The slight difference in looks isn’t what’s stopping people.

Gnome 3 seems to be designed for touch screens, but it rarely is used with one.

The distro matters because some have better defaults for one DE over another.

The downside of KDE is the millions of options and features. It can get in the way and makes it a little harder to learn.

That said. KDE is pretty great and currently my favorite.

it demonstrates what real power is. You can get away with things regular people can’t.

It supports their ideas.

The movie about civil war being bad.

Wargaming was popular in the military before it was widespread among the general population.