Estudante de Engenharia Informática apaixonado pela área; algures em Portugal.

Administrador da instância lemmy.pt.


Computer Science student, passionate about the field; somewhere in Portugal.

lemmy.pt instance administrator.


https://tmpod.dev

  • 4 Posts
  • 16 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: September 10th, 2021

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  • I’m not sure how they are less usable than Discord. “Everyone” (using quotations here because it’s not an absolute thing, but it’s almost so) knows how to e-mail, it’s one of the most fundamental Internet skills. Using Discord, however, is not, for a large amount of people. Sure, most developers either have had contact with Discord at some point or are capable of figuring it out just fine anyway. But seeing as FLOSS really shouldn’t just be about developers (as Drew points out too) and as end users should also be accounted for, e-mail as a basis for coordination and support is a very valid choice.

    It’s pretty much account-less (in the sense that you don’t need to create yet another account), it’s easily indexable (there are plenty of web UIs for mailing lists), it’s convenient and highly asynchronous, not to mention it’s a mature and well established open standard and decentralized protocol, with lots of open tools that fit the spirit of FLOSS in general.

    Discord, however, is closed, “unindexable”, doesn’t work offline at all (with e-mail you can read and compose e-mails totally offline, it’s heavier (both in terms of computing resources and data transfer) and full of intrusive pop-ups and whatnot (and has arguably distracting money-seeking features). That’s fine and maybe desirable for certain types of communities, specially the instant aspect of it, which is a strong and harmless difference between the two, but it’s not fit for the base space for contact between developers, contributors and users.

    In my opinion, of course.


  • I’ve been finding Zulip quite helpful. It’s threading model is great and they overall focus quite a bit in the project coordination use-case. You can either self-host it or pay for their managed hosting (which is free for open-source projects), and you can add a plugin to make static HTML pages of streams (aka channels) in order to make stuff indexable and searchable (and iirc this is getting polished and built into Zulip’s core).

    If you care about accessibility, email is still the best choice — it’s mostly text-focused, doesn’t need an account (besides what is universally seen as the most basic Internet identity), truly decentralized and has mature tooling. I just haven’t found a really good mailing list archive web UI. HyperKitty is good, but isn’t quite there for me. lists.sr.ht is neat, but lacks a lot of features. Above all, indexability and searchability (from inside the UI itself) is key.











  • While others have mentioned the great GrapheneOS, I will throw two other options:

    • CalyxOS — privacy oriented Android OS. While Graphene focus on security pretty much above all else, Calyx focus on privacy (and usability) more. Both essentially only target Pixel phones and are great choices.
    • LineageOS + MicroG — AOSP fork, continuation of the old CyanogenMod, with an open implementatinon of Google Services. This is perhaps the most “normal” OS, seeing as Lineage’s core is user freedom and not exactly privacy; however, with MicroG, you get a pretty private system with very few to none of the side effects of deviating a lot from standard Android.

    Graphene is a great project, but I think it may be a bit too much for someone that is just entering the privacy world, hence why I’m suggesting these two options as alternatives that are less strict and “cumbersome” to use, so to speak, while not really sacrificing privacy.

    In the end, as all things privacy, it depends a lot on your threat model, your tech proficiency and willingness to make “sacrifices” and adapt.



  • I meant alternative apps to Google’s in general, not to GMail specifically. Ditching GMail is an important step, as you block a relevant source of personal information, but using alternative apps, like MajorHavoc recommended, is another great step. NewPipe is one of such apps (I disagree Tubular is a better pick, but that’s something for another post).

    K-9 and FairMail aren’t a good alternative to GMail. Not alone, that is. GMail is both an e-mail provider and a client, but I’d argue the first point is the most relevant. If you use a FOSS e-mail client with your Google account, nothing is really changing, they will still read all your mail. You have to change providers as well, which isn’t trivial for most people.
    E-mail is an insecure means of communication, so you shouldn’t even use it for sensitive things, depending on your threat model, as usual. I personally use Migadu as my provider, for all the customisability and “vanilla” e-mail infrastructure they have, but Proton and Tuta are good alternatives as well, if you don’t mind or don’t care about the non-standard extensions.





  • It’s not open source but it’s quite literally the best Android application I’ve ever seen, by a significant margin. It’s from the good old days where apps were small, very well designed, very polished and did not collect data.

    It’s FX, a gem ever more lost to time. The site is a bit old and unmaintained so SSL certificates may give you a bit of trouble, but you can just ignore the warnings, it’s just an info page.

    FX, despite not receiving updates for years has so many features of such great quality, I’ve yet to find any alternative with a truly competing interface and feature set.

    Been using it for 10 years and it has been the pinnacle of Android.

    Edit: I know you’ll be detracted from trying it since it’s not FOSS, but seriously give it a shot.