It's basically a replacement for SMS, not anything near what Discord does.

No not really, Matrix doesn't have voice rooms or game streaming.

It has voice calls and meetings but that's not the same thing and has much higher friction to use.

I doubt people hate decentralization directly, it's just that the decentralized services out there are difficult to use and lack features people are used to.

Yeah having a messaging app I enjoy using is important. Good UI and fun features make something worth using, it's why telegram is still my most used messenger.

Telegram is great indeed. I'm happily paying for premium for two reasons: first it's not expensive at all (2€ per month) and secondly it offers so many fun and useful features. I often buy it for friends too as a gift. They really have a good thing going.

On most other platforms it's usually more the stick than the carrot (pay up or we bombard you with ads) and it's tons more expensive, eg Instagram alone costs 3x as much.

Everything is fantastic, I wish I could find a Linux alternative with a similar GUI and filter/search bar syntax.

This might be harder to do on linux because filesytems are different. If I'm not mistaken, NTFS has big tables that can be directly read without iterating through the filesystem tree. I don't think this is true of most popular linux filesystems.

Yes it is.

I think this is what icloud does. Seems like an easy way to make tracking useless if every client did it.

Yes in my opinion the benefit of smart home stuff is not controlling things from my phone or tablet or some touchscreen on the wall. But instead having the same physical switches and controls as one normally would, with the ability to automate things in the background.

Smart home setups where a failure stops you from turning on a light or opening the garage is the worst possible combination.

The trend of smart devices that require internet access to function even when on the same local network as my phone or smart home system are a good example of very poorly designed products.

I guess the answer is just screen record instead of doing anything with the data from YouTube directly.

Getting a capture card that supports VGA is another possibility. Or don't and just say you did. Is there realistically any way to know whether a video was screen-recorded or if it was downloaded?

I assume if you download the stream directly it could be shown that your copy and youtubes copy are identical, since encoding a video and compressing it is different every time.

It seems to me it would be terrible mechanically because the driver has 2 very weak little lobes sticking out.