As someone who heavily uses Bandcamp both as an artist and a fan, I am still dedicated to the platform. However there has been a decent amount of enshittification recently - now they are pushing artists to switch from PayPal (bad) to Stripe (worse) for artist payouts.

Why is Stripe worse you ask? Well the first thing they ask you to do is give them full access to your online banking through your primary bank when you set up an account.

Grapheme is smooth as can be for me and great for multitasking

I personally found it very easy to install Graphene and get it up and running.

Same! I have a few of my very early very primitive tracks in Buzz.

Jeskola briefly revived it so if you’re wanting to return to trackers could be worth a look. Renoise is still hyped (haven’t tried it) as is the hardware Polyend Tracker (also haven’t tried it).

I’m more of a (virtual) modular than a tracker mindset these days so a combo of FL, Bitwig, Reaktor, Plugdata etc to make a fusion of industrial and idm–

https://sunthief.bandcamp.com/album/thy-neighbors-looking-glass

Jeskola Buzz Tracker. Making tracks in a vertical midi step sequencer with no mixer was wild AF.

IIRC it came with an awesome drum kit called PSI Drums and a set of proprietary plugins (non VST) which included several cool synths abd Whitenoise Stereodist - the most brutal distortion I’ve ever heard, surpassing Ohmicide, Coldfire and Rift in its ability to turn things into aggressive digital terrain.

Migrated to Fruity Loops pretty soon thereafter

From an outsiders perspective, element has never worked for me and never been stable enough to get anywhere close to discord. Joining servers is buggy AF and Element X is severely hobbied on mobile.

I’ve been refusing to use discord for about 6-8 months and am often invites to join various discords by IRL friends and online communities. I wish Matrix / Element was a viable alternative but I’ve never been able to get it working for anythung other than DMs, and I’m already happy with Signal for that honestly.

As a non developer I want to be sensitive to the amount of work involves, and the number of cooks in the kitchen, but the fact that we don’t have a FOSS- federated slack / discord killer app is leaving so much interaction on the table.

I’ve heard of Revolt but it doesn’t seem to be there with encryption

This type of thing (+ the AI embedded shenanigans) is what sent me over to Obsidian for personal use.

Still use Notion a bit for work but I’ve peeled way back on it.

Just bought a 9 for Graphene. Up and running - works like a charm. Devs are not announcing end of the line for Graphene development- they are making daily updates on their way to bringing out Android 16. At this point I’d grab a 9 rather than wait for the 10. Get yourself up and running before Google tries to lock us out of more apps - right now everything I need runs fine without any play services whatsoever. The OS is solid, Vanadium is really good - I could go on and on. If you are onboard and interested in the project its 100% worth it from where I sit.

Nothing is ever perfectly future proof

While true, I think many have been motivated to take much further action, get organized and get knowledgeable by the clear collaboration between the far right / neo reactionaries and the tech right in the US in the last decade. So basing the guide off of that will draw attention

I have found that Waterfox is slightly, slightly faster on both Windows and Android and am loving it so far.

The PurchaseWithPurpose community here on Lemmy and other platforms does a great job of pointing at achievable change by dissecting nine differences between available alternatives.

Privacy is a spectrum; I agree with comments here saying to look at these much more hardened principles still even if you won’t ultimately be taking them up on all their suggestions