Some things I would caution here for clarification:

Matrix is known to leak metadata and has weaker E2E encryption than other E2E encrypted platforms.

Signal is better than most platforms for one-on-one messaging (can also be used for larger groups but doesn't have channels) but it has shady requirements like requiring a phone number and requiring an Android or iOS device (doesn't support less corporate OSes like Linux as primary device) and the desktop application message storage not being secure (largely a desktop OS problem since their security tends to be horrible, but Signal could add more protections and doesn't), and other weird things like requiring proprietary libraries and not having fully FOSS builds and crypto stuff. It's not anonymous meaning theoretically the Signal backend could link sender IP addresses to exact recipients which is just enough data to be useful to intelligence agencies if Signal happens to be compromised (which they have received government funding in the past and suspiciously stopped updating their backend repo for like a year not too long ago). Signal is fine for the average person, but I've seen political activist groups use it and act like they're anonymous and I would be very careful in that situation. Otherwise if you know people that use Signal it's still better than most platforms, I would recommend using the Molly client which is actually FOSS and has more security features than the official Signal client.

Cwtch looks like the overall best alternative (edit: actually it's not on F-Droid which is weird) to Signal since it is decentralized, doesn't require a phone number, has all of the main encryption features Signal has, and has an option for running a server to reduce battery life and increase message delivery reliability. Briar is similar and works over Bluetooth and local Wi-Fi making it a decent option for protests (if you even bring a phone). SimpleX Chat looks better than Signal as well since it doesn't require a phone number. Also XMPP which is decentralized and self-hosted but it requires a server setup. I haven't really used either of these platforms though so I can't attest to whether they actually work well.

Lemmy and Mastodon are not private unless you are very careful in signing up for a public instance and not revealing your identity, assuming the instance you sign up for even allows that. However, they aren't run by corporations with shady agendas which is the most important part.

I'm really nervous about losing my already barely accessible healthcare since my medication is extremely expensive

Yes I've met lots of those people

$20 = $140

-$20 -$20

0 = $120

/120 /120

$ = 0

I unironically talk to AIs a lot because it's easier than talking to actual people

It's sad that communities I used to think of as progressive safe havens quickly started justifying this shit as soon as Democrats hopped on the anti-immigrant bandwagon.

Doesn't NYT cut off most of the article now? I used to just be able to disable JS but that didn't work anymore last I checked.

I have not maintained any packages before but I am very interested in learning how, I shall look into this.

The easiest way to learn this is to download the Guix source code and look in the gnu/packages directory to see how other programs are packaged and look at the official packaging guides/build system options/guix import options/guix refresh (updates package definitions)/contributor guides (if you want to set up the local Guix repo copy more correctly) in the documentation - gnu/packages also has certain files for running guix import in if a program you're contributing needs dependencies that can be guix-imported. Simple things are easy to package, so are binaries if you're just doing it for yourself and need something quickly (I think nonguix has a binary build system specifically for that as well), it's programs that have a ton of libraries (especially with Python and Node.js) that are the problem since there's no internet during the build process so running the project package manager won't work.

I vaguely remember this was the originally used in Hurd? if so that is cool.

Yes, Guix System works with Hurd as well although I don't see any reason to use it since it's in an incomplete state and there are more interesting OS projects being developed like RedoxOS or Genode.

I have been wanting to set up upasfs this may be the push I need to finally get around to doing that.

Guix Home (and Guix System) has a services section in the documentation that has configuration options for certain things including email so I would suggest looking at that. (The Guix Home services also work on foreign distros.)

I will try installing it as a package manager

That's the best approach to learning Guix IMO, especially using Guix Home. Once you have it fully set up on your current distro with Guix Home, you can copy your configuration to a Guix System install later on and replicate your current user setup really quickly. You can also return to your distro package manager quickly if you decide you don't like it.

One other thing I forgot to mention is that Guix works weirdly with non-POSIX shells like fish and nushell so you might need to modify the configuration to automatically add the necessary environment variables or it will end up being stuck on an outdated Guix version randomly which will cause weird issues when you install/search packages or run guix pull.

I use Guix Home on my laptop (on top of Asahi Fedora Remix) and started trying to use Guix System on my server a while ago. Here's some points I have:

• The declarative configuration system is fucking awesome and makes Debian feel like the stone age. It does have a high learning curve though but it is definitely worth it.
• When deciding between Nix vs Guix, I ended up settling on Guix because Nix seemed more focused on marketing and cutting corners to make a working product faster and Guix seemed more like a community project with better ideological goals behind it. However, I have hardly used Nix so take this with a grain of salt. Also, Nix has a lot more packages and is closer to being production-ready and in a business setting I would probably choose Nix for the project instead because of that, it also is compatible with macOS and Guix isn't.
• The Guix package manager is source-based and the repos are committed to 100% free software which I really like compared to Nix which just throws binaries in their repos. However, this means that they need to package everything to work within their ecosystem as if they are packaging for an entirely different OS, and this is often very time-consuming, especially for packages with hundreds of dependencies. Combine that with the community being very small and niche, and repo under-maintenance is a very serious problem. Many core packages are outdated, which also seems like a security hazard. If you're expecting to use a bunch of new Rust-hype programs or something that isn't mainstream, they probably aren't there (you may find them in an obscure third party repo however). Some core libraries made significant changes to their build process when they updated that haven't made their way to Guix so they may be stuck on an old version until someone decides to update it. If there's a package you need, expect to either package it yourself or download it with a different package manager like Nix or Flatpak.
• Most modern hardware requires proprietary blobs and you'll need the nonfree Linux kernel from the nonguix repo. SystemCrafters has an installer image that comes with that IIRC.
• You may be interested in an "Erase Your Darlings" system configuration (do not save filesystem state to disk except for files/folders explicitly opted-in, requires even more upfront configuration but helps ensure reproducability). Nix has that built in. Guix doesn't, but if you fuck around enough with the partitioning you can get it to work. I have a setup with BTRFS and subvolumes that took me a week to figure out and I had to do some hacky setting to make it work correctly with Grub. Also it's more difficult to do when you don't know how Guix's file structure is laid out or are unfamiliar with the tooling and configuration language, there aren't really any good tutorials on the internet for it either so lmk if you need any help (it doesn't have disk encryption however since it is on a VM).
• If you want to make sure your system stays pinned to specific software versions, the way I do that is I have a channel.scm which has the channels like normal. Using the just command runner, I have a Justfile in the directory where I store my configuration. just update runs guix time-machine pointing to the channel.scm which pulls the repo's updates then after the -- has the command that prints the channels with the specific commit to channel.scm.lock. For every other guix command, such as the reconfigure command, it uses guix time-machine pointing to channel.scm.lock then the command I want after --.
• Flakes is probably the most hyped feature about Nix, which instead of using a central repo for all software lets each project turn their git repo into a source for the package manager which can point to other repos it depends on. Guix doesn't really have this feature, but since its main goal is creating an ecosystem of completely free software, I would argue that the centralized approach is better for this project since it helps GNU achieve this goal and provides guarantees about the freedom of the software and the packaging quality. Guix also makes it easy to create your own repo for packages or turn your project into a repo for a package, but it can't refer to packages outside of the repos that are listed as sources on your local setup so it isn't really flexible like Flakes.
• It also uses Shepherd for its init system which uses the same configuration language as the rest of the system. Compared to systemd I am not sure which is principally better, however it provides an additional roadblock to packaging software since most stuff is designed around systemd-based distros.
• This project is niche and has very few resources for help aside from the documentation, the source code (there seems to be quite a bit of undocumented stuff so you'll probably end up browsing it sooner or later), IRC/mailing lists, SystemCrafters, and a few random blogs or git repos. ChatGPT fucking sucks at Guile and it spits out code that is about 80% incorrect so actually learn Guile and don't use ChatGPT (sometimes it gets the parenthesis wrong too which is kindof hilarious).
• Setting up Emacs, a local SMTP server connected to your email for git, and a CLI password manager will probably be helpful.
• Have a copy of Guix cloned on your computer so you can browse around and see how stuff works (especially packages and services). It's the same language as the system configuration language which is helpful. The documentation also has a guide to set it up for contributing which you may be interested in at some point.
• The contribution process is weird, it uses a lot of command line tools which I kindof like but it also has a learning curve which doesn't help with the contributor shortage. Also it seems like a lot of patch requests get ignored and in some cases how to contribute is confusing. I was trying to contribute a Rust program once but it added hundreds of libraries and when I submitted it months ago it got ignored so I don't know how I am supposed to contribute these sort of programs and the mailing list/IRC didn't give me much advice either.
• For finding packages, there's https://toys.whereis.みんな/ which shows stuff from nonguix and other repos you'll probably want.
• For making your own packages, the guix import feature can be helpful and works nicely with Rust, especially if the program you want is in crates.io in which you can put it in your packages repo very quickly.
• For using Guix for software projects, there aren't a ton of libraries packaged so you'll need to see if your language is supported by guix import. The Node.js ecosystem is allergic to FOSS so it might not work very well with Guix (there are barely any Electron programs packaged outside of nonguix also).
• guix profile and guix home are confusingly different. One uses imperative install commands and the other uses a declarative configuration and they install into different directories, so if you remove a program from home but it's still there it may still be installed in profile.
• Most packages should be installed using guix home and don't need to be installed systemwide. It also provides powerful containerization/environment management tools to isolate installs efficiently.
• For server stuff, Shepherd has a sandboxing feature I've experimented with a tiny bit that isn't well documented (if at all), I haven't tested it in a while though but with it you don't really need to containerize stuff. I haven't figured out how do manage the networking correctly but there's probably ways to do that as well.
• For servers, trying to package Node projects that aren't in a single binary sucks.
• For desktop usage, I would recommend installing Guix Home on your current distro first and experimenting with that before doing a full system install (which is what I'm doing right now since being on a Macbook adds additional complications). You can do the same thing with Nix home-manager also.
• Guix and SELinux don't really get along, on Fedora you may need to disable it (I don't know how to use it correctly with Guix) which weakens security (which on Linux security kindof sucks). This is a problem with Nix as well.

To address your points:

The Debian/Fedora based ones seem to be fairly slow to update and so they have out of date packages, which sometimes is ok, but sometimes if they are too out of date I have to compile it from scratch.

Fedora is way more up-to-date than Guix is. Also Guix is source-based so it may end up compiling stuff from source automatically. You can install Nix though if you need it which looks a lot more up-to-date.

I end up spending a lot of time configuring stuff that isn’t built in

You'll be spending a lot of time configuring stuff with Guix as well. However the declarative style makes it a lot easier to track and maintain.

having stuff randomly be broken after an update

Libcamera broke pretty recently on my Guix install which broke a ton of programs although it might be fixed now. If that happens though you can revert to your previous configuration or pin the repo to an older version until it gets resolved. Normally packages are checked when they are updated though to ensure they don't break stuff.

I don’t have a lot of time to mess around with configuring stuff all the time.

You'll need to spend a lot of time learning stuff since there's very few tutorials on the internet.

Ideally I’m looking for a distro that works well with my old-ish hardware (with NVIDIA support unfortunately)

IDK if nonguix supports NVIDIA or not but it might be a problem.

if the library is designed to use like ‘pip’ or ‘bun.sh’ or some built in package manager

You can still use other package managers, but you can't use them to package the program specifically for Guix. You may have luck using guix import instead however. Also bun.sh is an example of a non-mainstream program that probably isn't in the Guix repos.

But there's also situations like Israel genociding Palestine where if there wasn't a social media platform for footage to spread on a lot more people would probably be pro-Israel (right now Israel is extremely unpopular at my university because of the genocide and this is even one in Texas). Regarding social connections in real life though those have definitely taken a toll.

I'm in that age bracket and male and among the people I know reading literature is basically nonexistent. I constantly see people browse Instagram when randomly bored so a bunch of organizations use Instagram as their primary means of communication then I end up browsing Instagram to get updates from those organizations and get addicted to it like everyone else. Video games are social and also addicting so people prefer those over literature as well. Aside from that people have very limited time and want to spend the few moments of free time they have doing things that are more social, more engaging (which black marks on a white paper doesn't do a great job at, I can barely pay attention to them for like 2 minutes), or more relevant to their hobbies or future. With music on the other hand I've seen differently, a lot of people use Spotify frequently and I've met quite a few people who have strong interests in certain bands or genres. Also while the internet has caused all sorts of problems regarding addiction and misinformation and people not being as social, I think it has also caused people to be more connected and empathetic on a large scale since they see the struggles of people outside of their physical social bubble.

I see four Linux logos and one of them looks suspiciously out of place

I wrote on .world that progressives losing interest in Harris was her own fault for being a conservative and supporting a genocide, and they just downvoted me and accused me of being a troll.