BadgerInATrenchcoat @ThreeBadgersInATrenchcoat@social.privacytools.io

I've been researching on essentially the best messaging apps that aren't Matrix or Signal, as while they're top notch services, I was curious what I could use that had no reliance on a central server. This turned out to be a huge rabbit hole and something that is next to impossible to find. Briar has no desktop clients (bar a scuffed Debian client), Tox leaks more metadata than Discord, Jami is so unstable that it can barely be classified as "ready for use", etc. It shouldn't be this hard.

@buckE First off, welcome! Mastodon simply explained is pretty much Twitter, but takedown resistant, with more useful choices (including instance and client), and much more private and secure. Its the only "social media" platform that I use, and I think it's pretty great.

@TheDoctor Not natively, I think we're still a ways off from triple a games natively supporting Linux, but using Proton 5.13-4 it has worked flawlessly for me so far.

My hosting related poll has ended recently and the verdict is in - if (and that's a big if) I can get the funding, we'll be hosting already established apps and services for the community. I'm extremely excited for and am looking forward to hosting for the community in the most private way possible. Hopefully more information coming soon. 👍

I haven't played a first-person shooter game in over a year and it shows. My aim is so shit now its crazy.

Just launched into Cyberpunk 2077. Most hyped and expected triple a game for the past couple years running flawlessly on Linux. Fucking nuts.

@weltsnake I was trying to play it but then steam died and I couldn't download it. I'm gonna try to play it at like midnight lol

@adinfinitum Except it logs IPs and still requires JS.

@ParmuTownley Wow you know a lot of languages, that's impressive! I have been trying to learn German and have really been struggling with it but it seems like you're quite a polyglot lol.

People who can read/speak another language, how did you learn it, or what program did you use to learn it?

I hate DuckDuckGo as much as the next guy, but I hate it for real reasons. Its slow, the results are bad, etc. But I don't hate it for the reasons listed in that article because they are almost all speculative or some are just false. This is a pattern, people generally who work for other search engines, go on reddit and lemmy and pick a few instances of a competitor making a minor mess up and blowing it out of proportion. Seen it probably fifteen times before. I wouldn't leave ddg cause of it.

Death is such a haunting thought. Like think about it for a moment. Its terrified me for the better part of this year, less because of death and more because of not knowing what is after. Like if there's an afterlife, what is it? Is it something like here? Is it good and peaceful where you can be with your friends and family? Is it infinite torture and pain? Is it nothing? I don't know - it keeps me up at night. Just thinking.

@ParmuTownley I've got an old laptop with similar power and specs to a Raspberry Pi 4 4GB, it runs great for normal storage but despite even being a bit more powerful than the Pi can't handle things like Facial Recognition for photos or anything like that smoothly or enjoyably.

Been using #husky for the entire time I've used Mastodon, but due to some in my opinion questionable philosophy on their part, just today I switched to #tusky - been absolutely loving it thus far and can't recommend it enough.

When you say seized, you could mean compromised unknowingly to the owner, or shut down -- and while yes, either of those situations are possibilities, as long as you're picking trustworthy VPSs, then the concern is minimal. Also storing minimal data allows for a setup that few other hosts have, where even if let's say the server gets compromised, they would get almost no data, and the data they would get would all be encrypted.

@Wetrix While P2P is certainly nice, it has a myriad of disadvantages, not the least of which is the fact that many applications, file storage for example, just aren't viable on a peer-to-peer setup. P2P is also much harder to achieve in web clients and most of the time will require someone to download a program or app. If I end up building services then it will certainly be something to look into, but if I'm using established ones, then it might be next to impossible.

1/2

I'm trying to decide whether it would be better to try to work with the community and build services from the ground up, or host a much larger selection of already established, privacy respecting services, and just store as little data as possible on privacy respecting VPSs.

@ParmuTownley I don't want to pitch it that way, if it was viable I would not even have anything like that, but hosting services requires you to buy VPSs, VPSs cost cash and a lot of it. I can't dump money I don't have into a project that I don't know if will succeed. I may go into more detail on my ideas for the project in the coming days, but I'm just trying to gauge support and maybe try to see if I can get enough to get the whole thing off the ground.

Thank you so much for your input!

@andreas That's great, I had been using xeddit before but it required js, so this is a welcome change. Now I'd only it would allow you to use a reddit account..

@distrotube@mastodon.technology If only it wasn't thrashed in comparison to Searx-