I'm stuck with an open source project on Discord for a mix of developers, artists and casual users across a wide range of age groups. I'd love to migrate off but I honestly can't think of the right platform.

1. Lots of people like realtime chat. It's worth having something that fills that niche (the old "mailing list + IRC" combo used to work well)

2. Forum software is usually fairly awful. I don't want to install some 15 year old pile of PHP with bad UX.

3. A "Stack Overflow" style site requires a lot of moderation and either annoys users for being too messy or annoys users for being too strict

4. I actually still have some fondness for Google Groups but Google's brand is too tainted for most people.

5. Nobody under 30 seems to use email any more so mailing lists are out but something that syncs with email is a must (reply notifications etc)

I am also hoping for something free but very easy to install. (SaaS with a free tier, one-click docker or similar). And easy on resources ideally (I guess $10/month for hosting is about our limit at the moment)

Yeah. I'm asking for a lot.

Nothing matters. You live for a while and then you die, but it sure can be a cool trip getting there!

i feel like most people assume people are dead when we really dont know. there could be flashes of experience after death due to mechanical agitation/disturbance. or maybe something else. and maybe the part of the brain that is needed to produce "experience" is a tiny little section that goes un-noticed when they look for brain death. its not very important so i havent looked into it. but i am afraid that if i die and i appear to die before my brain is inactive then i will have a captive body experience -- unpleasant on its own and very unpleasant if i make it to the autopsy. i dont think they even check for brain death or electrical activity before they start cutting you open. i simply dont understand people who choose to freeze their heads -- its literally the worst idea. i would pay for the opposite service where they take posession of your body and make sure you dont have a captive-body experience and make sure that your brain is destroyed so it can never be resurrected and tortured.

i saw a youtube video where this young woman recounted a near death experience that she had. she was in her car and somehow the car became airborne and was headed straight towards a thick traffic sign pole or something like that. in any case, she saw the pole coming toward her and she knew without any doubt that she was going to die. and she said that she saw flashes of every time she was terrible to someone. and she hadnt realized how terrible she had been in all these instances. and she said she was angry at god in that moment for showing her these terrible things right before she was going to die. i think its fascinating because the body is watching the situation and when the situation is right, the body deploys the mechanism that it thinks is useful. you can look at a picture of a bear and you wont be affected but if your encounter a bear in real life, you wont just go into fight or flight; you will be having a frame of mind and motivations that are unique to that situation because your body is giving those to you. and here, when the body believes with enough certainty that it is going to die, it deploys these memories? maybe the body allows you to see what its been hiding from you for your own sake in a last ditch effort to produce some kind of advantage. the human mind is very mysterious. but my point is that there is some mechanism at the bottom of that. it could show you anything. it could make you experience anything. there is this mythology of having happy experiences on the way to death, walking into the light, etc. but we have no idea what these experiences are other than the fact that they exist. its possible that most people have a terrible, awful experience on the way to death. its something that i think is just underappreciated.

That is… fairly accurate.

It leaves so much to parameters, you could describe practically any universe with it. It’s closer to a a generic virtual machine for universes than an actually useful theory.

That doesn’t mean it can’t be right, but it would be really disappointing if it is. It would imply the anthropic principle really is the only reason our universe looks the way it does. And no, you can’t use string theory to predict anything.