• 3 Posts
  • 128 Comments
Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: June 28th, 2020

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  • 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.




  • 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.



  • Jerboa vs. the website do different things since they render Markdown differently. Markdown itself is so spartan that it doesn’t have many things users want or need, so a bunch of incompatible forks get made & everyone just pretends it is all the same when in reality, it often lies on a single tool’s implementation.

    Take AsciiDoc with its verse directive or reStructuredText with its line-block directive. Both get you poetry-style newlines on demand & are a part of the spec instead of left to the implementer.


  • 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.




  • 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.