Sounds to me like you need something simple and quick. If the current system works for you I would suggest to keep using it. If you ever feel like you need something better I would recommend trying microsoft todo or google tasks. Google Tasks syncs with your google calendar so it's a bit more powerful. Apart from them both a pretty simple. If you are looking for something even simpler take a look at google keep. This is what I use personally.
I'm sympathetic to the text file, but for me the problem comes when you have todo lists that you are sharing with someone else, like a spouse. Then you have/want to share and edit them collaboratively.
Simple enough, there's ways to do that, but by the time you set that up to work across multiple devices of your own and someone else's, it's simpler from a UX perspective to just use an app dedicated to that task. I suppose we could use a Google doc or something but there's Keep.
I'd be interested in trying something else — I have tried other things — but keep going back to Google Keep.
Especially for Android users, Google Tasks is dead simple to use and works seamlessly with voice prompting. The less I have to manually write or type out my reminders, the better.
My oldest todo app that I can think of was just a microsoft sticky note[1] on my desktop. It always stayed on my desktop. It lacked sync between other devices so that sucked but my pc was the only device I had at that time so it worked for me. After I got a phone; google keep has kept me company. It's dead simple, cross platform, and gets work done. The only fault? It's by google, and they have a long history of killing products.
Discord would be unpleasant for something like this with so many participants. It's a similar reason to skipping out on Hangouts, Zoom, etc. It forces synchronization, if you're not online during the discussion you're effectively barred from it. It can be very hard to catch up and very hard to respond to any particular thread of discussion. Discord is also, by design, essentially single-threaded. You can reply to specific comments but it's still presented in an interleaved format which makes tracking difficult when multiple threads of discussion are occurring at once.
If the discussion is light, it's a non-issue, but with 300-800 (per eatonphil's comment) it's likely that it will not be light.
Your criticism of discord for this use case is valid. I didn't mean it has to be discord, it could be any platform as long as it allows having proper discussions without being a pain. I believe something like a flarum forum would be way better for this use case.
Only a minority actively participates. But it's for all the other reasons you mention yes.
And, unrelatedly, even though few actively participate that isn't the point. It is a motivational vehicle. And I repeatedly hear about this from folks who join and don't participate. That's perfectly fine with me.
It's hard to keep people active for this kind of initiatives. I am also running an engineering book club and found the same challenges, especially with timezones. However, as soon as you find a group that can join every week at the same time over Zoom, it's the best way to build community and enjoy the discussions.
I believe it has more to do with having a great user experience than to do with whether it's a native app or a web app. Figma was convenient and way ahead of it's competitors. The thing that made it stand out was the collaborative features and the extension ecosystem. The features it didn't have were launched by highly motivated people as extensions. It made both collaboration and working fast extremely simple. Both collaboration and extensions are features that can easily be added to a native app. I love figma but I do miss the ability to be able to work offline.
If you don't know how to sell, There's no point in worrying/focusing too much on the engineering side. While the engineering side is Important, People have to buy the product first for you to be able to earn anything.
> "the rest of the planet" doesnt accept visa/Mastercard just anywhere
India does have the infrastructure and accepts credit cards but it's not available everywhere and UPI is more widespread in India. It can be found in street side sellers to massive retail stores. While the street side sellers won't have the methods to accept credit cards, massive stores probably will and there are always ATMs so cash is a thing. For travel we have Uber, and Uber accepts credit cards. so, You don't need UPI but it's a great convenience to have. On the other hand, Not having Internet access after you get out of the airport is definitely a problem.
Adguard seems to offer blocking only, whereas Privaxy "is able ... to inject scripts as well as styles into HTML documents", which was the feature my comment expressed interest in.
The readme goes on to say: "Privaxy is also way more capable than DNS-based blockers as it is able to operate directly on URLs and to inject resources into web pages."
I tried starting a blog as a kid, I tried monetizing it using Adsense, my application never got accepted, but somehow my account ended up active for 5 minutes before my application got rejected again. I abandoned the blog, and on visiting it after two years, I found out it's showing ads with an adsense account that shouldn't be showing ads, and then I was banned. I would never know if it was because I was still a minor or because Google bots didn't do a very good job.
