I have been this last week. Very cool. I even built a keyboard for Sailfish OS.

CalDAV supports notes/todos. I never used it tho. I usually just Note to Self on XMPP.

• Gmail -> Posteo
• Chrome -> LibreWolf
• Photos -> rsync (I don’t trust Discord-only communites)
• Drive -> rsync / VCSs
• WhatsApp -> XMPP
• Keep -> What?
• Docs -> Text editor / LibreOffice
• Google Translate -> Yandex Translate (FOSS options do not generally support Eastern languages)

Which is why it is important to continue calling them out. The casual privacy enthusiast just regurgitates an infographic or YouTuber. Can’t expect them to be experts, but we can tell them that there is a deeper rabbit hole.

There are many ways to make things resilient. Centralizing isn’t one of them.

Signal is too pedestrian. Without decentralization, your chat isn’t private enough as you don’t control the meta or the servers.

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.

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.

Impossible to take them seriously if they have already started off on the wrong foot using exclusively megacorpo proprietary platforms for coms. If your developer / testers privacy doesn’t matter since they opted for Microsoft GitHub & Discord, what would lead you to believe their project would take privacy seriously?

It is entirely centralized in the US—& there is 100% chance the NSA is tapped in on the metadata they can get a hold of. You can’t self-host. They have been hostile toward alternate clients & are very adamant you use one of the duopoly of Google/Apple mobile OSs as your primary device (screw you if you want to run an alternative OS or no phone I guess). There is a hole in the history for the server that leaves room for conspiracy theories.

Signal is adequate for privacy-focused normies, but does not deserve the pedestal it is put on which is why many folks more serious about the ideals instead of focusing on making concessions are skeptical of Signal. This isn’t a hot take or new stance.

For the masses maybe, but Signal & Bluesky ain’t it for a Privacy forum

Always was 🔫🧑‍🚀

Persistence is for forums. Chat has horrible discovery / search UX which makes it a black hole for knowledge—which is why it should be seen as temporary (I think even Signal sets 4 week expiry as default). Folks often say things the regret 5 years down the line in chat space & that sort of info needs to just fade away than be some target of some weirdo doxxing campaign.

You know you can have archive management & multi-devices without syncing the entire history right? Some protocols think holding onto the last 20 messages in a new group & the last year of private messages is good enough (can be saved local to the device if desired). Copying the Discord/Telegram/Slack model ain’t it.

Synpase is the reference server. It’s Python & slow as balls because of it, but the others are always playing catch-up. With Element moving with it & graceful fallbacks not being a high priority, shit just doesn’t work in practice using anything but Synapse / Element since most other users are using features on that setup. Technically having alternatives is not the same as the current situation in actual practice. Even if they can try to hide the some of the perf issues behind these gland concepts like sliding sync, there are literal fundamental issues with how the protocol is architected that a server of hand-written optimized assembly could never overcome—the eventual consistercy is by design.