It serves the key purpose of Mumble, in that it provides a reliable way to get in a voice chat with people. The other features (text chat, video calls, screen sharing, “servers” that let people aggregate for a dedicated purpose/community) come together to make a legitimately good product that’s hard to replace.

Is there a peer to peer equivalent to Discord? That feels like it would be the best option, since it wouldn’t rely on a centralized company that could enshittify the product.

It is a bit baffling. I think it’s more ethical than the alternative though: pay gating useful functionality. Offering paid pallete swaps doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, someone who would never pay for that, but it does at least mean I can just ignore it. If they were to, say, restrict voice calls to a paid subscription, suddenly I’m in a position where either I’m paying for the service or ditching it entirely.

I guess the primary difference is between legally free speech versus socially free speech. The argument being that the government shouldn’t stop you from slinging slurs, while you have absolutely no right to not be ostracized/shunned/shamed by your fellow man.

What disinformation?

Officials said he refused to step off the vessel and threatened to kill himself. He also claimed that he had a bomb on board, according to court papers.

Oh so he’s not a cool weirdo, he’s a terrible weirdo. Damn.