Seems like your issue is mainly with voice recognition.

For a different perspective, I’ve set up my apartment with Home Assistant and smart lightbulbs a few years ago and it’s honestly been really nice to have all lights become dimmer as night approaches, turn off automatically as I go to bed, then be woken up by my bedside lamp mimicking the sun (especially in the winter). Being able to access all lights via a mobile app has also been really useful.

Perhaps the sweet spot is to find where the “smart” home can help you with your routines?

I never really bothered with voice control as I don’t like the privacy implications.

ChatGPT has no concept of truth or sources. It will straight up lie to you.
It’s nice for “creative” stuff but never, ever take its responses at face value.

Relying on common sense for critical information is a trap. You’re “googling” because you don’t know. The incorrect answer might be just plausible enough for you to believe it. This is why credible sources are important, to act as a sort of fallback to authority (I trust “source X” to provide correct information).

Mom doesn’t necessarily have to be on Meta. If she wants her son to engage with her on a platform, she can be on kbin, lemmy or any other FOSS alternative once it reaches maturity.

Not being tied to a giant corporation should not mean “obscure” or “unusable for normal people”.

People figured out email, they can figure out the fediverse, it just needs time.

My point is that we need time and patience, not interfacing with Meta. Whether they use ActivityPub or something proprietary shouldn’t matter to us and I’m not convinced matters at all in this context.
Meta already didn’t wait - they have Facebook, Instagram etc. There’s Twitter. We already exist in a space with big competitors, and somehow it works. Inviting them to our space sounds risky (risk of centralization, ads, bots, rage bait for engagement…).
If our thing is better, more wholesome, with less ads and bots, it’s going to attract the people we want on our platform, regardless of whether or not we federate with Meta.
Plus, as was already said, fediverse success should not be measured by how many people use it. If enough do to produce good content and engage with, that’s great on its own :) Small communities have benefits.

Duke Nukem 3D, Jazz Jackrabbit 2 and GTA 3, for me. They just feel cozy at this point…!

Colobot was made open source a while ago and is still great! The game assets (and original binaries) can also be downloaded for free from the dev’s site.

For anyone “willing to give Meta a chance”, ask yourself:

Q: Why is Meta doing this?
A: To make money.

Q: How is Meta going to make money out of this?
A: By having as many users on their instance as they can, so they can sell their data and advertise to them (that is Meta’s modus operandi, after all).

This is already antithetical to the entire fediverse concept, where you want users to be as spread out over instances as possible.

Having most of the users on one instance means the “community cost” of defederating from that instance is enormous to the point of being inadvisable for an instance admin. This brings us to a scenario where the ‘federation’ is essentially useless, as everyone is producing/consuming content on the one instance.

Therefore, the idea of a commercial entity using the fediverse, by itself, mutilates what the fediverse is all about.

Holy strawman, Batman!
I’m not even going to address the rest of your comment if the thing you start with is claiming that I don’t want developers to get money for their work.

How do you even use Teams on Linux these days, except for as a PWA?
They’ve recently gone the extra step of discontinuing the native app, making it even more of a headache to use it…