Ward

This is an accessibility feature. My deaf friend uses it because he can't hear the chimes and wants to know about notifications even if his phone is on the desk. That being said, it would be super distracting in a meeting.

I think this is mostly due to the highly polarized political climate. California is the most populous state and it's policies frequently end up spreading to other states and therefore is frequently focused on because if it's major influence. This is similar to how Texas and Florida are in the news a lot for their more conservative policies. While there are people out there who take the time to inform themselves and make their own decisions most people are only able to parrot back talking points they hear from the news or their friends. I suspect your coworker is one of those people and probably leans conservative so all he hears all day is how California's policies are making housing too expensive and it's too "woke" etc.

It has federation so you can talk with people or rooms on other servers. There is also voice and video chat supported by matrix but I'm not sure if conduit has that yet. Also smaller things like picture and emoji support. Irc is a much simpler protocol so you give up a lot of functionally over matrix. In the end just pick whichever one has the people you want to speak to or set up a matrix bridge to irc and speak to people on both if you don't mind self hosting

Well I certainly didn't see this one coming

This person would probably be able to get away with living in the US without too many looks but this is a slang term for vagina in the UK so they might have a rough childhood there.

Either you need to expose those two services to the Internet or use a VPN. You mention vpns are inconvenient but have you checked out tailscale? The free account does your needs and it's by far the easiest one I have set up. You can also look into a cloudflare tunnel but you would need a domain name for that

Maybe they changed it then. Last time I went there I got the same stream of celeb posts the OP was talking about with nothing else.

All of that stuff exists on lemmynsfw.com. you just have to be logged into the instance to see it from their home page. Most mainstream instances are defederated from it to prevent porn from showing up in all.

I think lemmit.online is already doing something like this and that whole instance is designed for it. They even have a community for suggestions on which subreddits to do. I would start there to avoid having to completely reinvent the wheel (unless you are into building things then by all means)

For me it was Mahou Sensei Negima. I was also into Naruto at the same time so there was a lot of that mixed in.

I've posted here in the past week or two more than I posted on Reddit in the past 11 years. I think it's the smaller more engaged community that encourages me to do it. Comments don't just get lost in a sea of jokes and grammar bots.

Not quite what you are asking but you may want to look into tailscale. It provides a greatly simplified way of setting up wire guard and has graphical controls. The free tier is more than sufficient for me (up to 3 users) so hopefully it works for you to.