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.

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 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.

We can & should demand at least gateways & mirrors if not at least a single alternative. Considering they have funding, they can self-host to actually control a forum or chat room as well as a code mirror (even if just HTTP with no forge). Folks are also undervaluing how some users are banned from access to these US-based platforms under US sanctions.

The pro-FOSS stance would be to get your communications off of being exclusively proprietary platforms. Developer & early adopter freedom & privacy matters—but instead they are choosing Discord & Microsoft GitHub as their only platforms.

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

You can also choose to use technologies that aren’t such resource hogs. The eventual consistency model of Matrix alone & storage costs causud many medium-sized operations to shut their doors. Distroot.org for instance had to move to XMPP to deal with costs—& I have personally seen others.

Synapse boasts about 50,000 concurrent users on a node. Ejabberd has been tuned to 2,000,000 concurrent users which shows how efficient & scalable the setup can be. €5/mo is a lot for many folks.

You say this but Matrix is largely centralized so it would be easy to get the biggest node to comply. Servers are quite costly to run too which is a big problem.

Signal & WhatsApp are not secure enough. Meta/Facebook regularly give data & metatadata to the cops & Signal is centralized & not self-hosted by your crew so while messages are encrypted, the metadata still isn’t. If you must use Signal, I would pick Molly as an Android client since you can a) encrypt the messages under a separate password for storage on seizure & b) you can use the UnifiedPush version to make sure your notification metadata isn’t going thru Google’s Firebase servers. Protests are the ideal place for Briar as it is works via mesh net so internet & SIM cards are not required (but years ago wden I tried it, the app was a major battery drainer).