And both suck for discord-like large communities (esspeically xmpp). We have thousands of open source p2p encrypted secure messaging software, yet almost nothing that even gets close to IRC for federated communities. In all fairness I also haven’t sat down and tried coding a software like that but I’d 100% throw some cash at anyone who can
I think you misunderstand the point of atomic still. Your base system should be installed entirely through ublue or other. Every time you update ublue will hash it and you can go back to that exact config with a working base system. Flatpaks and distrobox are user applications and should store all the data they need somewhere under your /home. Back up your /home and /etc with rsync or similar. When all is said and done your be able to recreate your system with ublue, and restore your configs and personal files with rsync.
The advantages of ublue is you can easily share or restore your base system without needing to backup gigabytes of data every update