Gen 2 chevy volt owner here, PHEVs are absolutely not a step back. If I didn't buy the volt, the one car our family could afford would have been an ICE car. IMO, these things help bridge idealism with current reality - for most of my day-to-day, I drive a fully electric car. I just also get the option to toss some gas into it when on a long road trip.
I've had it happen on servers where that moderation option is not enabled. My worst experience was trying to join a friend group's discord via an invite link shared with me. I was prompted to create an account with email, and I did. I was then shown a read-only view of the server: I could see all messages and other folks could see I joined and 👋 to me. I could not send messages myself, however, without verifying with a phone number. Further, I couldn't use a Google voice number (my primary number) to verify, nor my "real" number which was associated to another account.
Sometimes it depends on discord itself finding you suspicious, for some definition of suspicious. perhaps a user agent whitelist? lack of Google cookie?
it's awful and I hate it. I generally prefer not to have a shared identity across communities, and there's no way to create a usable discord identity without a phone number.
Why do you need to back up that server data? The great thing about joplin, is that the full content of your notes (and history) is distributed, like a git repo. As long as you have one device left with your notes, everything else can be bootstrapped from there. If your sync server burns down, start a new one and sync your notes to it again.
I use Firefox on all my devices and couldn't be happier with it. I especially love how sync works: there's options to both pull tabs from other devices, and push to them. Quite frequently I'd be just browsing on my phone and send a tab over to my laptop to deal with/read/act on when I'm sitting down at a bigger screen.
It might be an attention thing. With an emoji in a post your eyes are drawn towards the cute colorful picture before you l've read the content of the post. Emoticons on the other hand don't stand out as much, but serve a similar purpose: punctuate a thought with an emotion (=
I personally recommend the ender 2 pro to all my friends who just want a taste of getting into it. You can get em pretty cheap online, or at microcenters. They work well pretty much out of the box, but simple enough to get you to learn tuning them. And they come with a magnet removable build plate.
I can see it happening if it becomes an "appliance", similar market to what the home assistant green doodad is going for. "put this shiny blue cube full of hard drives into your kitchen, and join the identiverse! it also comes in purple!"
on my car, there's a fuse you can pull out, which theoretically cuts power to OnStar. check your car manual/forums about your model