Depends on how it’s implemented. Anyone using a “media proxy” will see their discord bridged media probably fail to load (outside of possible caches) after a day. Anyone who has their bridge configured to reupload discord media to their homeserver should see no change.
You want a magic Discord speedboost? It’s called OpenAsar. Mitigates telemetry, and speeds the client up to usable levels, especially on lower end hardware.
Not just the “lack of APKs”, but the lack of a FOSS build. As you noted, it is possible to instal an AAB by extracting the APK(s) inside, but that doesn’t magically remove non-foss libraries.
The only build is an aab file. This is a Play Store bundle file, not an APK, so not directly installable in Android without the Google Play Store.
The only build being a Google Play release also indicates that non-foss libraries were likely included, such as the FCM libraries, as is common for GPlay releases of otherwise FOSS projects.
As far as I’m concerned, Element X for Android is not available yet, unless either building from source (with modifications to included libraries), or by using a non-FOSS version from GPlay.
Your iPhone 13 syncs slower over USB because Apple decided to stay on Lightning connectors, which use USB 2.0 on the other end. Although FireWire was faster back when it co-existed with USB, the USB standard has surpassed it a long time ago with more power, faster speeds, and better physical connectors.
“Android” phones can sometimes have “close to mainline” Linux distributions flashed onto them. You can get some of those, used, for less than 100$.
A custom Android rom would provide you with a decent chunk of the freedom you want in a mobile device.
A phone specifically built for Linux, with as much as possible FLOSS firmware, will cost a lot more. The cheapest is probably the PinePhone.
VRChat in particular has been degrading in quality and experience ever since they needed to start pleasing investors. You can give it a try if you want, but there’s a lot of toxicity there. Platforms like ChilloutVR or NeosVR have a better (but smaller) community.
Although some titles like BONELAB or Pavlov do feel a lot more like “tech demos”, they are still great titles. Some desktop titles also have VR ports that are worth playing, No Mans Sky and The Talos Principle come to mind.
The modding scenes of a lot of games have good VR mods too, “Vivecraft”, if you’re into Minecraft. Subnautica has a good VR mod, Half-Life 2, Deep Rock Galactic, Outer Wilds, and much more.
I don’t have a direct source other than the source code of the software they use: https://github.com/mautrix/signal
When using one of their “cloud hosted” bridges, the bridge software (that connects between Matrix/Beeper and other protocols) has to read all message content. Otherwise, it’s impossible to bridge to another protocol. E2EE becomes end (other users) to bridge (beeper) encryption.
With “local hosted” bridges, E2EE stays intact, but messages can’t be sent/received if the device hosting the bridge is unavailable.
In the future, with MLS (a different E2EE protocol), it could be possible to keep E2EE even when bridging to Matrix on cloud hosted bridges.