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toastal

@toastal@lemmy.ml

toast.al

he/him

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toastal ,

The rage-inducing MOBA’s what? Real cliffhanger at the end of this meme.

toastal ,

It’s not the standard tho. Every style guide says this is an error it with the optional exception of single-character capital letters …such as Oakland A’s.

De-googling and privacy on Sony xperia

I have been considering replacing my nearly 7 year old iPhone (although very reluctant) and I was checking for options. Really the only phone that caught my eye was the Sony xperia 1 V, but I found no information about how to degoogle and lock down the device. I really like the features and the built in camera apps, etc. Is...

toastal ,

I have an Xperia 5 III.

All the Sony Xperia phones consistently & eventually make it to LineageOS mainline (so LineageOS for microG support too), but these ROMs don’t tend to come until near then end of a device’s 2 year warranty. I would assume that this is when they get cheap/used enough that developers can get their hands on them. Sony provides all the tools to unlock so it isn’t difficult or locked behind some centralized server for unlock keys. However, the nice cameras the come with… well you need their proprietary app unfortunately or the camera becomes a plenty bad device with the default LineageOS software.

On the plus side you get to support the only brand still shipping flagships with microSD, a headphone jack, and the ability to unlock bootloader (bonus the the 5s are <6" screens which is rough to find smaller phones now). Google Pixels won’t get you a headphone jack or microSD & Asus Zenfones don’t have unlockable bootloaders.

toastal ,

Now do Microsoft.

Remove Microsoft Windows & slap on your favorite distro. Stop communicating with Microsoft Teams & Microsoft Outlook. Run a local LLM to remove ChatGPT. Switch to LibreOffice from Microsoft Office. Move your code away from Microsoft GitHub & Microsoft npm to Codeberg, Notabug, Radicle, Nest, Darcsden, Smederee, etc. …or self-host. Find a different cloud provider than Azure (or Amazon). Play games literally any way that doesn’t involve Xbox. And it shouldn’t have to be said, but deleted your LinkedIn account—it’s just spam.

toastal ,

GrapheneOS only works on Google hardware. Part of the advantage of Android is device variety, but GrapheneOS forces you down a narrow path. Want a rugged device, a headphone jack, microSD? Well Google doesn’t offer those so GrapheneOS can’t meet your device requirements.

toastal ,

It would be possible to ship generic system images with separate updates for the device support code. However, it would be drastically more complicated to maintain and support due to combinations of different versions and it would cause complications for the hardening done by GrapheneOS.

Sounds like they could, but have resource limitations to do it. It’s also a knock against Google whose hardware has gotten worse. Personally, IDGAF about these project-imposed requirements if I can’t have the standard headphone jack on portable device.

toastal ,

And? That doesn’t change that you are limited strictly to the other featuresets Google phones provides… if you need a feature Pixels do not provide, then you will be using a different OS.

toastal ,

Use on multiple devices (in addition to mobile device)

Anything that isn’t green here is a ‘no’. The amount of service requiring mobile devices is absurd. I would hope many of us would love to make the jump out of the Apple/Google duopoly at some point if not already, & these sort of lock-ins should be avoided if you put even two thoughts into the future.

toastal ,

Even with the UnifiedPush fork from F-Droid where you can avoid the Play Store & FSM notifications, you are still shackled to Android which isn’t a long-term solution with Google ultimately at the helm.

toastal ,

For beginner self-hosters Snikket’s guide is even less work than others, but ejabberd/Prosody are easy to setup up compared to most software. General public is generally out at needing their own server even if the system requirements for XMPP incredibly minimal & many would have access to hosting at home on the cheap with dynamic DNS & basically anything with a processor + a Linux distro.

Not sure what the modern feature support you are talking about tho. Some clients already have stickers, reactions, threading… but the ‘X’ is for ‘extensible’ so it is all meant to be optional on purpose so it is easier to implement clients & democracy wins on features that clients decide are worthwhile to uptake (at least now that Google is out of the picture dictating too much)--& you have community-ran compliance suites for server features like the one for Conversations. Having used a couple of Matrix clients that aren’t Element, the fragmentation of client feature support is literally just as bad--except there is a lot less maturity due to age.

toastal ,

Webxdc is pretty neat. Cheogram & Monocles clients also support it on Android.

toastal ,

You still shouldn’t dismiss these sorts of licenses as “free software” has done an alright job for user freedoms but not getting developers compensated for their efforts—which is why licenses like these pop up sharing the source code, but not letting their work be exploited.

toastal ,

Please correct me if am wrong since I have never made any mobile OS applications.

There’s the $100 fee or whatever to join the developer program even if your app is free. There is a slow manual review process. You have to share a 30% cut with Apple of any profit. Most of the tooling for iOS requires a macOS machine which is another massive money sink as well as being proprietary with no source available. I believe GPL or similarly licensed code isn’t allowed on the App Store either due to ToS conflicts.

Most privacy-friendly things take an source available, open source, free software, or other (post-open, copyfarleft) approach that conflicts with Apple’s model for software, but also developers are likely to be on Linux or BSD + a Linux or Android phone where everything will be more arduous to build & test while not even being a device they or their friends would use so why both building if likely you aren’t even getting paid for it.

toastal ,

Another tool to exploit the commons

toastal ,

Google services I still use before being unGoogled:

  1. Voice: I have to make like 1 or 2 calls within the US a year & not worth a SIM
  2. Maps: for when OSM isn’t cutting it & I’ll contribute the missing data after I found it
  3. Translate: for when Yandex Translate doesn’t cut it (everything ‘free’ only works with European languages)
  4. YouTube: no real alternative here that isn’t limited to just a piece of its scope, but viewed thru Librewolf+uBlock Origin+SponsorBlock or PipePipe

… and the last one is just basically every employer I have worked with puts all their company data on Google & it can’t really be avoided with them >:(

toastal ,

A YouTube alternative client doesn’t change that all of the infrastructure is Google’s. Even this video shows you need YouTube to reach the audience you want for this style of content.

I hadn’t heard of new translators options in the last two years, but only Lingva listed the two non-English languages I actually use. The rest are all European-based languages. I may have some time to check it out, but it looked like quite a bit of tooling to set up.

toastal ,

Yandex might be the same as Google, but spreading your footprint across services still has value as a technique for mitigation. The only other thing I use Yandex for is the occasional image search since it can sometimes do a better job than others.

toastal ,

Still waiting for Guile’s theme to replace the US National Anthem

toastal ,

Browse more with a TUI browser like w3m or elinks. A good website should be able to provide a decent UX even on these browsers which have too few features to exploit (namely no JavaScript). You could work it into a workflow like opening docs in a terminal split or setting one as your default browser in a TUI feedreader like Newsboat.

toastal ,

Things that don’t use binaries built for x86 lol

toastal ,

No need when you have free software Mumble + Murmur :)

toastal ,

Here I am self-hosting Mumble for friends & using Mumble at work. Old tech was built to actually be good on resources.

toastal , (edited )

Mumble is like a reliable Toyota Corolla. You will turn no heads, but it has all the features you would need for the task (encryption, room hierachies, ACL, machine-learning-enhanced noise canceling, positional audio, choice of method input like push-to-talk, mini UI overlay atop games), and does them efficiently.

…And like a Toyota Corolla, there’s probably a decent upgrade out there, but you might be compromising on more than you think. Want a car without the manufacturer tracking you or bloated, touch-screen navigation? Many ‘modern’ VoIP options, especially proprietary ones, are literally doing the latter.

toastal ,

My phone has extra buttons, so I use the camera shutter for hardware push-to-talk

Visa Adds New Way To Share Customer Shopping Data With Retailers (www.businesswire.com)

Visa is rolling out new technology that will allow the payments giant to share more information about customers' preferences [non-paywalled source] based on their shopping history with retailers as it seeks to remain a top player in the competitive e-commerce space. From a report:...

toastal ,

God(zilla), I hope this country continues to cling to cash. Big wigs & tourists want it all digital tho. 😓

Matrix client for Android for family and friends. Your experiences.

I want to migrate my friends to self-hosted Matrix server I have for some time now. The problem is, that all Android clients seem missing for me. Element is too buggy (especially for encryption) and has bad UX. Element X is still experimental and lacks core features. FluffyChat has most features and nice ones like stickers, but...

toastal ,

If they don’t care about the protocol, choose a protocol that doesn’t take minutes just to join rooms & has clients that use less data/power so the family isn’t annoyed to have that app on their phone.

toastal ,

Okay, but who’s is doing guerrilla advertising for a centralized service that requires a SIM card & an Android/iOS primary device or no account for thee. …At least in the past I convinced grandma this is the new SMS app you can use as I knew she would treat it as such, but now I wish I hadn’t since even that useful feature was lost. I want to drop Android entirely, but I need access to my contacts locked in the Signal system--which centralized system lock-in is one of the things we privacy-concerned folks want to avoid.

toastal ,

It’s the bare minimum for passable due to E2EE, not being owned by a corporation, & mostly open source--not “best”. We have better.

toastal ,

XMPP is an extensible protocol that has over a decade of battle testing from the casual chat to massive industrial communications applications (Zoom, Jitsi, almost certainly any online game you’ve played). It has E2EE in modern clients. It’s decentralized by nature & relatively easy to self-host. Both servers & clients use very few resources like bandwidth, storage, processing, memory (consider conditions of the time of invention). It doesn’t take minutes to join & sync chatrooms (MUCs). Gateways allow folks to talk across non-XMPP platforms. Governance is distributed in the open & not tied to a single entity. There are even projects like Snikket that can be rolled out for a family that is close to turn-key for set up. Along with something like Movim can create a self-hosted social network built atop an XMPP server for posts to share stories & media for a longer-term storage.

If E2EE encryption isn’t seen as a must relying on TLS + self-hosting: lighter, simpler IRC (good feature set with v3) which has been around since the ’80s can be a good choice. Zulip which is a forum/chat platform that has the most usable UX for trying to actually hybridize both (it’s not amazing UX, but better than the rest); this can work for a great for certain communities that desire this behavior.

Distributed (not to be confused with decentralized) encrypted chat there is Briar with a mesh network not even requiring internet, but has limited platform support & last I used years ago had massive battery drain issues.

If you must, there is Matrix which decentralized & offers E2EE but is relatively expensive to run from the clients, to servers, to the design generally being that it replicates the room messages & attachments & state across all servers for all users. While that duplicated data is great for resilience, can be expensive to store & is what takes minutes to join any room. I think it was a design decision ‘miss’ to try copy Slack/Discord/Telegram-but-FOSS as doing too much & none of it that well--where I think chat is better to be a bit simpler + expected to be ephemeral & a different service like a forum for important, permanent discussions & FAQs. Mastodon suffers similar issues with replication that makes some have to shutdown their self-host due to cost--which has led to Matrix in practice centralizing around Matrix[dot]org (who has a history of Israeli intelligence funding) & the servers they provide to others funneling all the metadata thru their org since they offer free accounts, are big enough to scale, & have most of the users. Folks act like Matrix is great just for being newer, but the aforementioned already cover its uses while being more mature.

toastal , (edited )

Balisage Paper: Fat Markup: Trimming the Fat Markup Myth one calorie at a time

Old paper, but so are these specs which haven’t really changed. I know there are more formats than XML vs. JSON but they are two of the most common, and relevant to the battle of XMPP/XML vs. Matrix/JSON.

toastal ,

?

Images & video work fine on Cheogram, Dino, Gajim, & can be piped from Profanity

toastal ,

https://lemmy.ml/comment/11113492

toastal ,

So one of the best features is a bad thing? Is the irony lost on you that Lemmy is a decentralized system without a central server or app?

toastal ,

Hard why not both? You should use a password manager & create less accounts on platforms or sharing your phone/email if you can help it.

toastal ,

V true. I was think more along the lines of any sort of cash, debit, check transfer that doesn’t involve accounts or folks skimming money off the top rather than checks specifically when interpretting the meme.

toastal ,

This is how I ended up getting my account deleted as well. 3D scan of my head was a immediate nope.

toastal ,

Are FOSS licenses the best for a game & this sort of thinking tho? I am not convinced the FSF or OSI provide good enough guidance for those looking to escape corporate interest. Do you need a license that allows others to resell it? Why is the NC in Creative Commons seen with such hostility & incompatibility if upholding corporate interest isn’t a goal?

toastal ,

I mean I love the idea but I have had my misgivings about how the FOSS gatekeepers do their thing

toastal ,

I mean check any previous discussing that happened about License Zero/Parity/Prosperity licenses, or Peer Production License, or Anti-Capitalist, etc. & how they have wording that is basically like CC BY-SA-NC where you need to share the changes, attribute, but for profit entities are not allowed to use it without contributing (in terms of money, or code, or some sort of giving back). Droves of folks crawl out of the woodwork to say that this ruins the 4 FREEDOMS as if they are written in stone or that were made perfect since inception rather than trying to test if all these rules still apply or need amendments to the modern age & exploitation in software. It would be interesting to see if any group decided to really run with one of these licenses as a major project & seeing if the public not the OSI or FSF agreed with those terms… to maybe saying we need a new definition of those freedoms.

(Just as much I have seen some good arguments about devs to stop trying to use licenses as a battleground for politics or morality & that dealing with the status quo of establish licenses & fighting in other ways is a better use of effort)

toastal ,

Write back if you think exploring is worth your effort & find anything new in the space. It seems a bit underdeveloped since adoption is low where it seems most end up with OSI licenses as a practical compromise rather than what they truly wanted.

toastal ,

Also I really appreciate the cause. If I thought I had more relevant skills to what is mentioned I would ask to join

toastal ,

Movim is sort of like a decentralized social media space built atop XMPP

toastal ,

I have no idea what channels are… Is this threading?

toastal ,

Movim has public posts that can be commented on in a decentralized fashion but can also restrict comments to followers

toastal , (edited )

Paying a tutor or a class might be a good accelerant since you could ask fundamental questions in your native language. Once you have the grammar scaffolding, you could then use flashcards to start building vocab or looking for natives to share conversations with. Note also: immersion rarely works without some foundations to build on (unless the language in question is basically the same as your native language like Dutch is to English). The TL;DR is apps are more entertainment then education.

toastal ,

The best is to not trust the centralized server of either of these platforms. Set up your own XMPP server & gives these the boot.

toastal ,

client or server that doesn’t support the same encryption protocols

Outside of TLS which most any server uses by default, XMPP or not, the server is not responsible for E2EE. Conversations Compliance & Are We OMEMO Yet have existed for a long while & I never see anyone recommending a client not on these lists so while certain features may be fragmented, the communication essentials have been more or less established for years now. XMPP is an extensible format, and some applications that aren’t for chatting with your friends/family, don’t need many of these features which allows the protocol to morph into something stripped down for the task… which is why the base spec is basically barren, & community XEPs are what folks get behind for adding new features for different use cases.

toastal ,

XMPP is battle-tested* and thriving*

I don’t think you know how many commercial use cases are relying on XMPP, nor how much the community has been working on updates. Older technologies tend to have maturity is spec but also in implementations where the servers are robust & already at the point of optimization over chasing features. We see this with how little specs it takes to run a server & have Conversation forks on Android have some of the best battery life & data plan usage in the chat space. The network is massively decentralized too… unlike Matrix where almost everyone is on Matrix.org or a server provided/hosted by Matrix.org giving them all the metadata.

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