so get an anonymous pre-paid number

That’s not something that exists in many countries. SIM-cards have to be attached to a real world identity by law.

Why is that a problem?

Why are you posting as artyom@piefed.social and not <real name>@<home address>?

OK, well buy a burner SIM card

Illegal in many countries. SIM cards are attached to your real world identity.

Multiple-accounts and pseudonyms. It’s like the 101 of interacting on the Internet. With a phone number requirement that’s automatically made impossible.

Also SIM-cards/phone numbers are required by law to be attached to your real world identity in many countries.

The crux is that all the alternatives suck. I don’t have a problem going App hopping, I just have a very hard time finding ones that don’t fundamentally suck, and I am not talking about little implementation issue, but garbage like Signal that violates the GDPR, wants your phone number and is proud of it. Always grinds my gears when that gets celebrated as the “alternative”. Same with the Fediverse, where user owns nothing and server operator controls everything, how again is that different from Reddit, Facebook and Co.?

Nostr and Tox seem ok so far, but really the amount of true alternatives that improve on the original in significant ways is pretty damn rare.

You prefer:

     (add-after 'install 'remove-examples
       (lambda* (#:key outputs #:allow-other-keys)
         (with-directory-excursion
             (string-append (assoc-ref outputs "out") "/lib")
           (for-each delete-file
                     (list
                      "basic-server"
                      "helloworld"
                      "postcollector")))

over:

postInstall = ''
   rm  $out/lib/basic-server $out/lib/helloworld $out/lib/postcollector
''

?

The two main advantages of Guix are the language

I wouldn’t call that an advantage for the average person. Nix is far nicer to work with. Some Lispers might disagree, but I, for one, can’t exactly see the beauty in trying to turn Scheme into a configuration language with macros and hacks. Also Guix puts Scheme everywhere, things you can do with plain old Bash in Nix, you’ll have to all do in Scheme in Guix, so there is a much steeper learning curve.

The biggest problem with Scheme as config language is that it is sloooooowwwww. Nix is already quite sluggish when it comes to configuration changes, in Guix it’s a lot worse, and it’s unlikely to change anytime soon, given that Scheme allows macros and other hacks that might make it difficult to properly cache or index the package database.

journalctl is the one part of systemd I really do not like. For whatever reason, it’s insanely slow, taking multiple seconds before it gets around to display anything. It also has all the wrong defaults, displaying error messages from a year ago first, while scrolling to the bottom again also takes forever and consumes 100% CPU while doing so.

There are flags to filter and display only the relevant parts, but not only are none of them intuitive, doing a mistake there just gives you “-- No entries --”, not an error. So you can never quite tell if you typed it wrong or if were are no messages.

Maybe it all makes more sense when studying the man page in depths and learned all the quirks, but /var/log/ kind of just worked and was fast, without any extra learning.

You can manage multiple machines with a single Nix configuration git repository and modularize the configuration as much as you want. You can have a config with a desktop environment that you skip on servers, override individual variables for a specific host or do whatever you want. You can even remote deploy it all with a simple nixos-rebuild build --target-host "user@host" and it works across different architectures too (e.g. build on your fast x86 machine and deploy to a slow RaspberryPi).