I wish there was an active philosophy community on lemmy. I kinda miss r/Askphilosophy and r/askhistorians.
And to answer your question -
I don't really know. I guess people belive in souls so as to eternalize themselves and thereby reducing their fear of death, knowing that their soul will be out somewhere instead of the idea that they will return to a state of nothing.
I also think discord nitro is kind of B.S . The only reason I still use discord is because my friends use it.
I wish there were similar features in Matrix clients like Element. Just the voice channels feature will be enough for me.
Revolt chat is a good alternative. It lacks in features but its pretty good for an FOSS project. I tried to convince my friends to use it but they crawled back to discord after 2 days.
Do yourself a favour and try opensuse tumbleweed. You won't regret it.
Also even on arch things doesn't break unless the user installs a whole lot of stuff from the AUR. Since there are flatpaks around most people can get their day to day apps working without relying on community repos.
You do have a point, but each App's play store page itself shows whether it has ads or in-app purchases. One can use that as an indicator for selecting an app. So people just need to pay attention to the small text right below the App's title
Then there is always f-droid . You can find really good quality software without ads in fdroid. I rarely use the play store these days (except when I have to update whatsapp and banking apps)
I think there are services which offer temporary phone numbers like mysudo for instance. That being said, I have never used such services so I don't know how viable it is.
Extergaram is pretty good. I have been using it for about 4 months now. I feel like this is the best fork I've tried.
Previously I have tried Nekogram X and for a very short while Forkgram