We usually have the christmas parties at my house and I am able to go to my room. I would be a lot more anxious if I had to go somewhere else to a party that I could not go away from. I always dread having to go out for other parties.
I was harassed and stalked by people on reddit targeting people in disability related subs especially in the autism subs. I reported them and their sockpuppet accounts and nothing was done because reddit sent a message saying that it did not break their rules. When I told one of the stalkers alts to leave me alone several times I was flagged by a bot as harassing them. I appealed it but reddit did not care.
Another time I suggested to someone a telemedicine quit smoking service may help them and that was being flagged as “unauthorized transaction of prohibited goods”. They banned me for 7 days. They never even told me what comment I made but that was the only comment I could think of that might have caused it. Reddit themselves advertises these very same telemedicine clinics and you have to go through a doctor to obtain any medication, I was not sourcing any products. I sent them an email basically begging them to tell me specifically what I said that was wrong but they never replied. I said at the end “How am I supposed to learn from this if you won’t even tell me what comment was against the rules and clearly explain it to me?”. At least on most lemmy instances there is a modlog with what comment broke the rules and specifically why.
Meanwhile I see tons of subs and users doing way more than what I did. This coupled with the fact that I am part of the blind / visually impaired community and reddit banned the third party client I was using that had far better features for disabled users really turned me away from wanting to keep posting on reddit. Their global moderators and a lot of the subreddit and chat moderators are sometimes just straight up evil people who don’t care about actual victims of abuse and harassment. I have begun to really limit my use of reddit because of this biased behavior.
You can use self hosted AI like others have mentioned but you can also use DuckDuckGo’s proxy service to access some cloud AI providers. It works over Tor Browser in “Safer” security mode as well for increased anonymous access.
Anecdotally my parents use linux because of me using it on my computers too and one nice thing about it is that they can have a consistent UI. The kind of changes that happen with at least some well established desktop environments and window managers are not nearly as radical as when Windows changes where things are at in their UI. There might be some UI tweaks here and there depending on your choice of desktop environments but I don’t use rapidly changing DEs on their PC. With some of the simpler well established DEs it isn’t typical that there will be a change so dramatic that you have to relearn how to use it like with Windows 8 or something. There are some such as GNOME that have undergone some heavy changes in the past but you can choose to use simpler ones like say LXDE or Cinnamon.
They mostly use the web browser anyway so it isn’t like it was a really steep learning curve. Since they switched to linux the amount of help I have had to give them has decreased. If my parents did more advanced tasks they would need to learn some new ways of managing their computer yeah but for them they just browse the web, use Libreoffice and use the printer mostly. Even before they switched to linux I had them using a bunch of open source cross platform software for years before that which did help the process go smoother but Libreoffice for example has a similar UI to the classic Microsoft Word so it was not like it was a huge learning curve.
I do their software updates but me doing software updates has just been me typing “sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get full-upgrade” and restarting. If there ever was a problem I would have to fix it but I would have to fix it if there was a problem with Windows too. I find linux to be easier to fix than Windows and the error messages to be easier to figure out. Overall the switch has gone well and there is less I have to worry about.