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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • I am very satisfied with my Fairphone 3. I still get monthly security updates. I can easily unlock the bootloader and install any alternative ROM I desire. I can repair any broken part without having to unglue something. But it also seems to be the most robust phone I have used in years. There’s a reason a used Fairphone is as expensive as a new one.

    If you really want to go all-in on privacy a Pinephone or Librem 5 would be options but they have their own bag of problems. They are better suited for tinkering.

    And regarding the comment on firmware updates of the parts themselves, that is a general computing problem that seems to be the worst with single board computers like smartphones. The solution would be parts with support for open firmware but they are almost impossible to find. I think Fairphone is going a good middle ground. I don’t expect there to be any phone where this is better.








  • Usenet is a very old part of the internet. I think it predates the world wide web. It’s basically a message board. Which boards (like subs) exist on there is democratically decided. At least that was how it was done in Germany. For example, when there where too many Star Wars posts in the Science Fiction group de.rec.sf they decided to create one for Star Wars under de.rec.sf.starwars.

    The actual content resides on newsservers around the globe. When you pass a message to one of them it is distributed around the globe to all the other servers. It’s similar to how Lemmy works, with the difference that with Lemmy content is only passed around when someone is actually subscribed to a particular community.

    But many news servers don’t pass around messages that contain files. Because that would take up too much space. To get access to the servers that do pass around files you have to pay for the service. That is actually used for piracy nowadays.

    Back in the days you could actually get access to usenet from your ISP. At least to the text only portion. Don’t know how you’d do it nowadays. It’s mostly fallen to obscurity.