Yeah. It’s thoroughly documented tho & nothing seems over-the-top. They also contribute to upstreams. A lot of folks use GitLab despite it only being open core. Every day I have to interact with Microsoft GitHub which is fully proprietary & they do nothing but inject social media nonsense to the platform & train on your data just to sell it back to you. Yet rarely does anyone complain about them being it the middle of free software, & instead they move all comms to the black hole of Discord. Meanwhile Google is no longer doing Android in the open.

I don’t think what Jolla is doing is evil—you just have to play by stupid capitalist rules to be a ‘viable business’ in this economy to keep the lights on. They used to have more stuff open IIRC, but it can be hard to do in practice if you are picking a niche taking on a duopoly.

Sailfish OS exists right now as a Linux mobile OS with their own hardware (& supports the Sony Xperia line as well—which have microSD & headphone jacks …which no GrapheneOS devices support 🙃)

One of my banks properly uses TOTP which is independent & the other uses SMS which isn’t secure, but is also independent. I would straight up leave a bank if an app was required since there are always other options.

Family is the easiest to convert since they have unconditional love for you & would me the easiest to understand your concerns. You could even roll out a Snikket instance for everyone to use together.

You can still use cash & websites for banking tasks. You chat should be on an open source protocol so there is bound to be an application or web app for that too.

Cheogram has a better featureset on Android in my experience. Movim has quite a lot of features & good performance for a web app—which covers the folks that “don’t want to install any new apps” (generally the right skepticism, but really most F-Droid ones are safer with less worry), or platforms without good clients. The biggest pushback I have heard was bad iOS clients—but being a self-hostable service with almost exclusively free software clients, it should be of no surprise any iOS dev is lackluster, being an entirely closed platform, anti-GPL, & with a hefty fee just to list an application.

We had this in XMPP a decade ago & they could have readopted the open standard instead of creating a new one. There is no track record of them not bending the rules to benefit just them anyhow—but this time it was developed exclusively by the tech giants which is absolutely for their benefit with nestled enclaves to meet the bare minimum requirements while still building the garden’s walls higher. Cabal-ass behavior.

The adaptors are flimsy and hang funny. Both of these options are putting additional strain on the only port for charging & data transfer—which is also making you choose audio or charging / transfer. Or they want to push you into buying irrepairable, flaky, branded earbuds what generally have worse audio quality & always having latency. When all non-phone devices are still understandably using the standard 3.5 mm jack, why give any money & reward these companies putting out devices with user-unfriendly IO when I can support one that does meet my needs?

You can make Linux more secure by various means, & we will never get to a better state until early adopters start adopting the ecosystems. I would rather do this than support more Google ecosystem stuff.

GrapheneOS doesn’t really give you choice. This isn’t cool to me—& you will have a hard time convincing me otherwise since there are plenty of precautions I can take with my setups & my threat models without being told there is only one option.

I laugh at the folks that think Ladybird will save us. If their project’s developers & contributors & bug reporters require using the data-sucking Discord & MS GitHub with no alternatives, what makes anyone think they would take privacy seriously?

I will never by a portable device without a headphone jack so that completely cuts off GrapheneOS which must follows the whims of Google Pixel designs. Instead I am currently trying out Sailfish OS on a Xperia 10 to use Linux—which hopefully can break me from the Google ecosystem.

Being able to have a decentralized form to accept patches is key to keeping the D in DVCS (distributed version control system). Pijul you can omit the email & even name if you want to be anonymous, or your key servers could offer better forms of communication.

I totally disagree with letting Microsoft GitHub be a sink for email. Not only is it US-based, publicly-traded with shareholders to appease, & fully proprietary… but they are also a major data siphon with Copilot™ products trained on then sold back from code & conversation in what should The Commons which probably include these no replies. We are also talking about a massively centralizing platform saying omitting your email is fine since you can direct your contributors to use their closed, proprietary platform—something anyone with any sympathy for free software ethos or even basic privacy for contributors would never demand, endorse, or encourage the usage of MS GitHub in any form.

Pijul decouples your identity from you commits & proves your SSH key ownership. It is a beautiful thing that you can change your name or email & not have to get a force push to update all that info since you are now just identified by the primary key from the identity server. No more worries about being embarrassed by your old Protonmail or GMail account,no more dead names in the commit history, & no care about identity stealing by just changing the config.

Mumble is great for audio chat, but I would not wish its text chat on everyone. For an audio application it is light on your resources, but not good enough to leave on perpetually since it will keep checking the mics which makes it great for idling in when you want to audio chat, but not good if you don’t want that noise. I run & use my server regularly, but I log out when I need to focus or to save battery. I think it works better as an auxiliary place to chill or for meetings & is better paired with a different application for text chat & keeping on more or less always (where that other chat probably shouldn’t be Matrix—not just for installation but the resources required to run it). You will also get iOS folks crying there aren’t any great ports since it costs money to be on the Apple Store, FOSS doesn’t have deep pockets, & GPL is banned.

Less than 30? Self-host an Ejabberd server on an old desktop under some desk for private message & multiuser chats + Jitsi which handshakes over the same protocol as the chats, XMPP. If you need some unified UI for everyone & a bit of posts, Movim can also sit on top of the XMPP server. If need need some low-latency, low-resource audio chat, let folks idle in a Murmur server.

Matrix uses way too many resources & is way too slow/inefficient at the protocol level.

You are really gonna want something beyond Markdown if you are taking anything other than the most basic of notes. Markdown lacks so, so many features & you will likely end up buying into some incompatible fork like the one behind Obsidian.

K. Have fun doing nothing & sticking to your shitty networks that give you no control or freedom—as opposed to trying literally anything to change the situation.

So you are saying we should all use Reddit, Discord, Meta WhatsApp, & Microsoft GitHub since more folks are there? The only way to buck those trends is to be the change you want to see & slowly move what groups you can away. You don’t have to get everything to buy in at once & there are mirrors / gateways that you can use as a transition. Make a clan homepage & say the VoIP is here & the chat is there… now you aren’t beholden to one specific tool going to shit or waiting 10 years for something to have literally every feature you want. If 2 applications is a barrier, maybe that someone isn’t the right fit for your group anyhow.

For the chat part: IRCv3, XMPP, Jami, maybe SimpleX.

As it stands for VoIP: Mumble, Jitsi (XMPP), Jami, maybe Movim (XMPP) in the near-ish future.

IRC & Mumble is centralized but super lightweight so you can spin up a server on any old hardware & can be fine for ‘clans’. Clients are efficient too. They aren’t encrypted other than TLS but are good enough for its largely-room-based goals.

XMPP is a generalized, decentralized protocol for presence & messaging. It has multiple FOSS servers that require a potato for hardware that you can spin up in a bedroom to join other bedroom servers where you can control your own data (same as Matrix, but a lot less resources & more mature). Chat can be encrypted (most clients support PGP & OMEMO). Some clients can do voice/video calls, many are working on multi-user call at present. It is the protocol behind WhatsApps, Zoom, Fortnite, League of Legends, & more.

Jami is P2P IIRC, but I haven’t used it—so I won’t comment.

But you can use a chat service for chat & a VoIP service for VoIP & that can be fine. A kitchen sink isn’t always the best approach.

But if you are looking to keep tabs on something, Movim is very much focused on multi-user jingle & is something you could deploy & have decentralized users join from their own servers.

Bad idea. Matrix is incredibly costly to run by design. The eventual consistency model replicates everything to all servers which is wasteful, slow, & isn’t going to scale. Many medium-sized servers have shut down for storage & CPU+RAM costs—which causes refugees to seek more centralized nodes. Hell, we saw it a couple weeks ago Matrix begging for money since they can’t even afford to run their own servers anymore. You should put your money into a protocol that doesn’t treat chat like a blockchain & is efficient enough to reasonably self-host.

Doesn’t have a cup holder either! Why does ever alternative need to have every feature or it can’t be called an alternative? Does your VoIP app need the ability to send videos? Can you not use something else in tandem to do the more social side? Sometimes it’s better to focus on one thing & do it well—especially under-resourced like free software often is. You could argue just as easily these other features as bloat if you don’t want or use them.