Correct answer right here. They are a hobby, and can be quite an elaborate one depending on your location, space, local ordinances, and budget.

Cheap eggs are cool and meat is cool too if you can stand to kill them. But if you’re going into that for those reasons then you’ll be sorely disappointed.

They’re also extremely sweet creatures when hand raised. They’ll come running and want to be picked up and everything. Eating them or having them die is awful.

It’s worth noting that their ability to avoid predators depends heavily on the predators where you live.

Coyotes and bobcats decimated my chickens regularly when I had them. They’d tear right through chicken wire in the winter time. I’m also not unconvinced that a few of the smaller adults didn’t die to some of the larger hawks in my area, but I have no evidence to back that up.

Baking bread is wild. When you start you do everything by the book and it’s meh. Then once you get a feel for what each stage is supposed to look and feel like you can just slap some flour around and it comes out awesome.

Game Boy carts don’t fail when the batteries die, they just lose their dave data. And most games didn’t even use battery saves. Thankfully replacing the batteries is a pretty simple job!

And not a single Game Boy cartridge. Now I’m just disappointed.

For chat: IRC, Stoat, Fluxer, Root, Zulip, Matrix, Slack, Teams, Guilded.

For voice/video: Mumble, Teamspeak, Jitsi Meet, also several of the above.

Perfect 1:1 drop in hassle free replacement with the exact same feature set? No, there isn’t.

Viable alternatives that aren’t too bad to learn? There are many.