Hotline was life-changing software for me. It was pretty niche, being Mac-only, and its BBS-like nature meant each server had its own culture and "cliques" and community. Getting an account on certain servers (rather than being a lowly guest) was a noteworthy moment. I remember a couple really badass servers like one called "JADE: where some guys in a university hosted a Hotline server on the uni's insanely fast connection. I want to say it was an OC-12 connection (600mbit)? This was in like, 1998.

I still have a few friends from those days, one of whom I talk to almost every day. Unfortunately one friend I met on Hotline passed away unexpectedly this past July. I never would have expected to be making decades-long connections when I was just a kid looking for "filez" to download. <3

Actually that same friend gifted me his old PC which was my first Windows machine. An amazing and kind gesture which changed the course of my life (I had grown up only with Macintosh systems until then).

Further, I found music on Hotline that I would never have found otherwise. I didn't find much on IRC (didn't know where to look) but I made connections with people on Hotline which resulted in me being exposed to amazing music from all over the world -- another life-changing experience. Too awesome :)

A new-ish project for a replacement firmware for Ingenic based cameras is here https://thingino.com/ . The developers are super active and very responsive.

There's not really an alternative.

Broadcom is one of the few options out there for ARM SoC. Rpi could dump a bunch of money into making their own SoC, but that would really ballon the costs.