There are fiat denominated gift cards you can buy with XMR.

Well, for the absolute best privacy and open source, you’d want Monero. But this wouldn’t let you do cards, so that wouldn’t work for you. You might be able to buy prepaid cards, but I’m not totally sure.

What seems crazy to me is how many people they managed to convince that they were private when they most definitely are not.

I noticed that the article said that open source models were about a year behind the top closed source models. And personally, I would use the open source models anyway, because I am an open source maxi. If I can use open source to get a job done, I will use open source. No questions asked.

Exactly. I can’t really stand chapters that are 8 to 10 minutes because I have to turn pages so frequently that it becomes really annoying.

I’m assuming it takes the average reading speed in order to make a guess, and I actually find that I like them, especially in fan fiction stories. That way, I know how long the chapter is, because I’m blind, so I use a screen reader, so I prefer somewhat longer chapters, because I don’t have to constantly switch pages as often with longer pages.

That might be kind of difficult. You might try something like hodlhodl or offer to buy something on xmrbazaar

Oh, nice. Whatever works.

Oh, that’s annoying. I hadn’t actually tried it myself. I had only heard about it.

Better, but still not great, because a lot of metadata gets collected even if the conversations themselves do not. Might I suggest SimpleX instead?

I think somebody forked it and is calling it IronFox. So you might want to take a look and see if that’s correct.

Yeah, Molly does the same thing and doesn’t cause me any problems.

For some people it doesn’t, and for others it does. So your mileage may vary. For example, with me, I have seen no significant battery impact, and I’ve been running it this way for several years.

On my device, I let the app just constantly hang out in the background with a persistent notification that I have turned off, but it does not have a significant battery impact for me at all. So your mileage may vary. Some people say that it has significant impact, and some people like me, it doesn’t impact hardly at all.

I don’t know about Telegram, but I know, at least with Signal, it should work with web sockets, and allow you to get notifications that way. At least that’s how I get my notifications on Molly, which is a fork of signal. While not many applications support it, you might also look into UnifiedPush and ntfy which is a UP app from F-Droid.

I would not be surprised in the least.

Fair point. But I just believe it goes to show that more websites need to be available on the darknet. Not because it’s a scary or bad place to be, but because it can’t be censored. Not nearly as easily, anyway. Top level domains can very easily be seized by the domain registrar or ICANN, etc. But since onion domains use keys, it’s impossible to seize them without seizing the server they run on.

The vast majority of people are woefully ill-prepared for an adversarial internet.

Torproject.org. There’s absolutely no way to censor the entire internet, short of entirely disconnecting the internet.

If you do not yet know how to use a VPN, you will learn in fast order.

Good point, I didn’t even think of that because the GPL and MIT are so permissive.