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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: November 3rd, 2021

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  • Neither servo rendering engine (like gecko), nor verso (an actual rust based web browser based on servo) are quite ready for prime time. But I’m hoping they will be there sooner rather than later. I don’t use Firefox directly, but rather wrappers based on it, Librewolf for the desktop and Mull in part because I’m lazy (I prefer the ankerfox stuff and other to be done for me), and if I want to avoid chromium based browsers, dominating big time (MS browser edge is as well chromium base, electron is chromium in disguise, and now a days QT web engine underneath is chromium as well) well there’s no option yet.

    On the other side, nothing guarantees servo and verso (or whatever other servo based browsers in the future) will care about net free advocacy, neither user freedoms, just be concerned about being better technical solutions, :( But I still have high hopes as you might…

    Just being a good technical alternative is not good enough now days, :(


  • This is sad, not just because it’s a trend on Mozilla, but because it shows how mozilla has embraced the corporative kind of mindset. The advocacy team was fundamental for net free principles.

    Mozilla based keeps being the only practical alternative to web browser dominance, but it itself has degrading its status of resisting bad practices against users and the web in general. And emerging alternatives are also technical alternatives only, with no intention of net freedom advocacy, GPL sort of principles to protect the user and so on.

    Sad days indeed, :/




  • Ohh, do you have miniflux self hosted somewhere so it does the feeds collection, and then on newsflash you hook with the miniflux reader?

    What I do to sync (I don’t read feeds on the phone) between desktops is to rsync these 3 dirs:

    ~/.config/news-flash
    ~/.local/share/news-flash
    ~/.local/share/news_flash
    

    That so I don’t lose the feed subscriptions neither the history of what I have already looked at, neither what I’ve kept as starred (there are interesting feeds I want to keep). If miniflux had sort of a client, similar to newsFlash, but that set everything in miniflux rather than locally, so that no matter different desktops (even phones) will have the same starred kept feeds, and the whole history and the like on miniflux… There’s a python client, but I don’t know if it gets any closer to newsFlash. I guess having miniflux, one can hook to it through any web browser as well, but I really like newsFlash interface, hehe.

    The sad thing is needing to somehow keep miniflux running somewhere, which is not feasible for me, and perhaps for others, but it’s interesting…


  • Just so you know you can get push notifications on Jami. Jami has been supporting unified push notification for a while now, but it’s opt-in, some might not opt for it considering reducing privacy a bit, as some actually disable the proxy and some phone specific feature intending to prevent battery exhausting too fast.

    For unified push support you can take a look at jami’s article about its unified push support. I use ntfy BTW.




  • Are you sure the phone it doesn’t work on is older than android 7? According to its f-droid jami URL its latest version as well as two more also documented there, they all work on android 7 or later.

    I use LOS4uG, and I’m currently on android 14, so no need to build jami myself. Can you enable “unstable updates” on f-droid’s “expert mode”? Perhaps then you get latest app, and that one works better. Otherwise you can report an issue to the android client, and perhaps you get guidance from them. You can also use their forum to ask questions. I have filed issues only so far.


  • dino is a gnu+linux software, built with gtk4. If you’re using windows then the option is gajim, which in order to support omemo needs a plugin, though I can’t tell much more than that about it since I can’t even recall when was the last time I used windows.

    That said, conversations has one important setting if syncing devices, which is indicating that the client won’t delete messages, the server will. Not sure why that is not the default, I guess statistically most xmpp users just make use of conversations and that’s it. The other important setting is configuring security for omemo always. Dino doesn’t need any setting for letting the server delete messages (it does when there’s no pending device to be synced) and doesn’t offer that option, and at the moment the user must be careful and set each conversation to be secured by omemo with no exceptions, but it’s already merged on master, and waiting for a new release, the option for omemo always, as on conversations.

    That said, using xmpp doesn’t imply not having jami installed and keep trying it. Who knows, maybe you like it and it works fine for your purpose, and you decide for it to be you main messenger application.


  • I do !

    works pretty well on both AOSP phones and gnu+linux desktops. Sad thing though is that I don’t like using flatpak, and I prefer distro native built software, and on Artix/Arch, there are times where the version between the distro version is slightly outdated with regards to the mobile version, and that makes things not to work. This is mainly an issue ever since jami decided to stop supporting the gtk client on the desktop, to me the qt experience have been sad. Not sure if someone has forked the gtk client, that would be great.

    So I’m using xmpp as my main messenger, and keep trying jami when it works.

    I really like the p2p approach from jami, and also the way they care for those with no huge batteries phones, given they added support for unified push notifications, which can be of course avoided if required for extra privacy. Given my use case, I can’t turn jami into my main messenger yet, but I keep trying, :) Meanwhile xmpp is there for me.


  • Is it something you have to trust they comply with what they say?

    Nice that it has its own indexes, but according to this comparison its proprietary SW, running on UK servers without tor interface, and being backed or debated at least by UK politicians. We’re not talking about a not for profit organization either, and they do have individualized answers as well, so they have the mechanisms to individualize results to queries, meaning they keep information about your queries. So in the end, it boils down to the user trusting its service it seems.

    Yes, meta search engines do not provide their own indexes, but searxNG is at least open source, you can select the search engines to use, included mojeek, and they serve as a front end preventing the underneath engine to track you (whether it’s against their public policy or not) as if you were to use such engine directly.



  • Actually xmpp is low on metadata compared to matrix which has to replicate a bunch of metadata everywhere. SimpleX look interesting, though by not being federated (considered by simpleX a privacy feature) whether you like their client or not. Just so you know privacyguides has explained why they don’t advertise xmpp as privacy oriented, and the reason is not that it isn’t, it’s simply that given it’s federated, they consider some clients are not as compliant or up to date, which is up to the user to select on XMPP, and also up to the user to file bugs against their preferred client or even contribute it with changes.






  • If talking about non proprietary kernels’ drivers, such as linux, then again, profit is what regulates it. No wonder why now nvidia finally cares about linux, being the most used kernels behind the cloud, behind servers of whatever. Meaning, it’s not profitable not to support linux now a days for Nvidia.

    The other fundamental factor is lock-in, which is abused by some big corps, such as MS.

    But the profit idea es even wrong, but it’s what we have been educated with. For an OEM, providing FOSS drivers or FOSS FW doesn’t mean to have less profit, but somehow it’s interpreted as such. And there’s also our culture, backed by corps again, that tends to make us believe that everything profitable enough has to be corporate secret, and if not, others would take advantage of you business. That way of thinking really prevents for more FOSS adoption at the OEMs level. I don’t agree with it. It might be the presence or lack of some HW features might be inferred by the drivers/FW, but it doesn’t mean your competitors will know how exactly you provide such feature, and even less how to make it with the performance you do. And usually once released, you really want to show off your features, your innovation and so on, not keep it secret. So in general, really see no issue for OEMs not to offer drivers and FW as FOSS, even as free/libre SW.

    I can imagine OEMs offering FOSS drivers and FW, but that not being as convenient for the major players in the market, since that would risk their position in the market. Just a thought…

    Remember the lock-in mechanisms by the corps that feel being threatened if open sourcing dirvers… Some of which no longer say it out loud, but still think GPLed licences are a cancer…



  • The issue with social networks is the account requirement. Even though decentralized, they still require servers with accounts. If you, to prevent not being able to access at some point included an email, and the server gets hacked, then there you go.

    Perhaps is a mistake of mine, to think social networks are not anonymous enough. Maybe they are. But tracking mechanisms are so sophisticated now a days, than the need for an account make me think they won’t ever be. That’s why I excluded social networks. Perhaps it’s the only option as of Today though.


  • I have never bought the idea that free/libre SW in general is just not as easy, including GNU+Linux. I’ll leave out open source initially, and come back to it later, not because it doesn’t experience the same, but because corporate wide it doesn’t suffer the same fate, for example linux itself is one of the most widely used kernel if not the most, it happens similarly to openssl, and so many other open source components. So I see no issue with linux adoption, I can’t think of any kernel more adopted than linux…

    To me what has really affected free/libre SW is the monopolistic abuse of the corporations, plus their ambitions, and how in Today’s world, they have created the illusion that being a technologist is the same as being a technology consumer, which gets into the hearts of governments and education systems (more hurting, public education systems). Let me try some practical examples:

    • Educations systems translate the need to educate students about technology into making them familiar with MS different SW, like the windows OS, MS outlook, MS office, MS project, MS visio. Even on the higher levels of education, colleges and universities prefer to use matlab over octave for example, even for just matrix operations scripting. Office covers spread sheets BTW, so people specialized on accounting know excel, but no other spread sheet.
    • On public education systems, where one would be inclined to think it might get more interest on developing the expertise to not depend on proprietary SW only, it’s where corporate reach deeper offering “cheap” educational licences.
    • From the prior two keep in mind that educational licenses from proprietary SW usually means future professional and people depending on proprietary SW in general. They are meant not to educate, but rather generate the future dependent population.
    • Governments, whether local or nation wide, instead of adhering to open standards, for any kind of form submission, and even further to adhere to use of free and open source SW, to build the technical and competency expertise required to have a criteria about different technologies, about SW, infrastructure, DBs, and so, they prefer to require citizens to use non free or open source SW to create required forms, and prefer to pay for SW solutions which totally lock in the entire solution, usually coming from big corps, or other companies actually making use of SW and technologies coming from big corps.
    • In their effort to discredit free/libre SW, the idea that the fundamental principles behind free/libre SW hurt the SW industry, or that are irrelevant to Today’s world or even worse than that, there were claims that the GPLed kernel was a great threat and GPLed SW a cancer. Now that open source usage has totally overcome free/libre SW, there are no such claims, but the damage is done. There’s nothing wrong with people wanting some compensation from corps, when developing SW, and thus not using free/libre licenses like GPL-3+ or AGPL, but in the end that eventually might hurt the users rights protected by such licenses, which such corps don’t really care that much (their profit has higher priority for sure), and experience shows that just because SW is licensed open source doesn’t guarantee any compensation for the development whatsoever, so if volunteering SW, doing so as open source is not even close to get every developer a decent income out of their contributions. Well, except for the big corps backed SW, linux included, but that’s not the majority of open source SW.
    • The discredit of free/libre SW, which allowed the eventual creation of open source, is such that the banning of individuals ends up being an attack to the organizations behind it and even their principles and motivation.
    • Moving away from the free/libre SW observations, even now with open source, from the big corps, which barely compensate the open source developers, complain about the open source supply chain, campaigning against not well maintained SW and such, there’s the famous image of a complex and heavy structure depending on a weak and deficient leg. Whatever truth around that figure, it of course hides the overall picture of the developer of such leg not ever being compensated (not to mention paid) for his library or SW component, and perhaps that’s one of the reasons the project got even abandoned, but now it’s easy to blame such situation when talking about FOSS in general.

    Paid SW might be more intuitive to use at times, I can understand that. There are paid developers making the UIs more intuitive and attractive, in the end it needs to be bought or massively consumed to get earning through its use. But if you look deeper, perhaps it’s not just that free/libre or open alternatives are non intuitive at all, perhaps people gets used to that UI when attending basic or high school, or college/university. Perhaps even when exposed to mobile devices even when they can barely walk. Everything else, different in nature, will look alien to the future “technologists”…

    On a sad (lacking hope) note, I don’t think there’s any indicator of things changing. My only hope is changes in educational systems, which are nowhere happening, and not the parents, as mentioned they are already convinced that using google, ms, apple, oracle or whatever prepare their kids for the future and will make them the technologists of the future.

    On a funny note, I would answer the motivating question with: Linux is so good that it’s actually most probably the most used kernel world wide, :)