It seems I didn’t communicate my reason for having Instagram well enough. I don’t have access to the “feed” or following people (it won’t load unless I accept some terms, which I won’t). I have an account with the messaging function bridged to my Matrix account, which lets me receive messages and (when it works) reply to them to organize moving to a better platform.

It’s the best solution I found if I want to keep contact with people I meet when going out or traveling. Phone numbers barely work (I still can’t call or message any German numbers, never found out why), and everyone I meet has Instagram. I just give them my username, they can add me easily, and then later over Instagram direct messages we figure out how to get them signed up for Matrix or Signal.

I’m personally trapped on Discord and Instagram.

Discord is required by my workplace, so no way of getting rid of it until everyone decides to move to something better. I have some friends on it too, but most of them also made Matrix accounts when I explained I won’t be very reachable on Discord (I only open it when necessary; and it doesn’r run on my phone since they rewrote the app in JS). I have Instagram as a way to people I meet during travel or events to “add me” easily, and then we can figure out a good way to communicate afterward. I’m not too bothered by having it as I don’t use it daily or anything.

While degoogling is accessible right now, what worries me is that all of these projects are 100% dependent on Google’s whims because they use Android as the upstream. Same reason why I don’t use Chromium browsers: yes, they can patch over things, but they can’t fight the direction of the upstream project and they are powerless if the upstream stops publishing commits / source, like Google seems to be moving toward. Additionally, what “the big distros” aka stock ROMs do to prevent FOSS apps being installed means a much much smaller potential userbase for them. I develop an Android app, and (while I don’t have analytics) I don’t find it unlikely that at least half my users are on stock roms that would lose access to my app with this policy. It’s much less motivating to develop something when I know less people will benefit, and especially knowing I’m supporting only custom roms that are 100% beholden to Google. Degoogling is a good first step. I’ve been on Lineage for many years now. But I believe that the step that will truly make us independent is moving to Linux phones.

What kind of collective action are you thinking of?

Cool! Perhaps I’ll give Qwant another shot. Thanks for sharing :)

Very cool, but this is old news from 2024. I wonder how they’re doing now.

I did not enjoy finding out only at the end that the images in this blog post are generated/made using AI.

Tuwunel had intentions to build a Synapse migration tool, but I haven’t heard anything about it since. Was waiting for it so I could bring over profiles and most importantly chat history for myself and my family.

Sweet, perhaps it will run better than Whisper (according to the graphs at least) on my poor phone as voice input method. Whisper works great if I give it 20-30s to think :)

Happened to me too, I was so confused. I hope it is a bug… EDIT: Found the report: https://gitlab.com/relan/fennecbuild/-/issues?show=eyJpaWQiOiIxMjAiLCJmdWxsX3BhdGgiOiJyZWxhbi9mZW5uZWNidWlsZCIsImlkIjoxNjk5MTU5NTd9

Enjoyed the article but augh that sticky banner at the top that follows as I scroll took up 30% of my reading space. Gave up halfway through to enable reader mode on Firefox mobile…

Bravo la France ! Here’s to hoping more cities follow suit :)

Hmm no, I haven’t had this issue. Tempo works fine for me, it’s been mostly bug-free except for a few oversights:

• search doesn’t work offline
• can’t play AAC files
• can’t skip songs via my Pebble watch

I’m (still) on a Pixel 3a, running LineageOS, in case that matters.

I did use Feishin for a while, it’s an excellent music player but unfortunately not a native program. I might switch back to it from Tauon though, as actually playing the whole song before going to the next is a pretty nice upgrade hehe

It looks really good indeed, and I don’t mind at all to pay for apps (I pay for FairEmail)… however it is very strange for me to add a nonfree app to the list I use every day… everything else is open source.

I currently host Navidrome, which has an okay web player. On Android I use “Tempo” (though it is unmaintained) to connect to it, and on Linux I use Tauon (though it has very poor playback). I could not find a native Linux client that is not buggy unfortunately, so I’m also on the lookout for better solutions! I’m not familiar with the device you are talking about but every client I tried supports MPRIS, which are the regular media controls that can be used via the playerctl command, so you should be able to hook things up that way.

I don’t have any advice to give but I want to thank you for considering this angle while building the website.

Thank you for sharing! I will check it out.

I started getting spam in German to an email address I gave to the town hall of my town. They use multiple domains to send it, but they all have the same link format that redirects to a fake AI-generated dating site. I’ve tried reporting some to the police, as well as the hosting providers, but haven’t heard back at all. I’d like to delete the address, but it’s the one town hall uses to reach me…

The amount of folks I see use Opera GX “gaming browser” because some influencer said so…