yagni3

My phone is way more battery light since getting off Google Services completely. Conversations uses a similar solution, I think, and I have way more battery at the end of the day than when my phone was stock Google Android.

Some of these are solved by setting up their own repo (though you can't force users to update in F-droid). Some of the tracking things can be handled, I believe, if they were built out and opt-in.

https://f-droid.org/wiki/page/Setup_an_FDroid_App_Repo

You can host a server, but you can't talk with people on the official Signal server or any other Signal server, as far as I am aware. This is not federated, just allowing of other isolated centralized clusters.

I use it, but feel like XMPP is dated and complicated. All the extensions and whatnot are awkward to get setup and you can't make assumptions about how well they're implemented or built on the server you're on or communicating with. I intend to move to matrix/riot when it gets more stable. Things like video are second class citizens on XMPP too and the desktop apps are painful in my experience.

I'd buy that. I'd go further and say a dumb phone that doesn't allow complex apps would be fine with me too. It has built in apps for a set of open protocols like the web, email, matrix/irc, vcard, ical etc. Updates these apps, but that's all you get. Pushing security on top of the Android ecosystem seems like a lost cause and building something with app ecosystem parity is a pipe dream it seems.

I still like Matrix' federated first approach to the server over Signal's, but this is a welcome change. Now we just need an F-droid build (official repo or built by the F-droid team).

Ehh. Git is decentralized, if you're that worried about uptime, self host a git-http/GitLab/Gitolite/Gogs/Gitea/(getmydrift) etc instance and call it a day. Or do GitHub if you want, but even Github has outages and can't 100% guarantee your data.

If you're afraid the non-git metadata could be lost, use something like git-appraise or get off the cloud or onto a separate cloud and get some bug tracking software or something.

I don't think the actions they took really showed vigilance or good form, but the transparency and honesty says a lot about the company IMHO. I also don't think stomping on them excessively does anyone any good.

Edit: Also, GitLab's business model is different than most in the space. Since even private repos are free, GL only makes money on their enterprise clients. Free private repos are essentially leeches, bloodletting for mindshare. Shouldn't ask for too much.

+1 for nix. _nix-shell_ is a great way to get stuff up and running without having to wrestle with the container boundry.