I too grew up gaming in the pre internet era, and I love pay to win. My favorite is when they just let me press A and the rest of the game just unfolds and plays itself while I watch.

That tracks. The AI push is extraordinarily premature. It makes sense that capitalist idiots see mass layoffs as improvement, but rational people do not.

Yes, you can use their exact build environment straight from GitHub. You can also use Molly.im which is another app that i think is a fork? Im still investigating it.

That’s kind of a core tenet of libre/open software, innit? Independently verifiable software that you can change at your pleasure.

I was looking at Molly.im and it has its own f-droid repo. There are two options: with and without Google servicios.