It’s not perfect yet, but it’s much, much better than the old days.

OMEMO is supported by every major client, and they interoperate successfully. Unfortunately, most clients are stuck with an older version of the OMEMO spec. It’s not ideal, but it doesn’t cause any practical issue, unless you use Kaidan or UWPX, which only support the latest version.

All popular clients and servers support retrieving chat history now too.

In practice, I’ve been using it for several months to chat with friends and family, and haven’t had any issues.

Perfect, now you just have to wrap your program inside a debugger in production!

Yep, that’s the gist of it. In order to change the license from the GPL, they’d need the permission of all of the copyright holders who’ve contributed code under the GPL to the project. After a few months have passed, this basically makes it impossible (or at least extremely difficult) since at least one person (and likely many people) will say no.

Thanks for explaining some of the history, it makes some sense and gives me some things to try. Thanks for all the work you’ve done on the mobile stack as well. It’s made my life a lot better. And maybe one day I’ll be able to ditch the backup nokia too :)

It was just from cycling. Perhaps he just got unlucky though? From the sounds of things his experience seems like an outlier. Or he was just so fast that the vibration frequency matched that of a motorbike 😁

I have a PinePhone Pro, and it runs nheko very well. Fractal is a little slower, but still usable. Not sure about Simplex I’m afraid.

I’m running postmarketOS v24.06. I could easily have messed something up though!

At least in my case! I ordered this year. It took 2 months, but it did arrive :)

One thing to be aware of is that riding around a lot with the phone attached can cause the stabilisation sensor in the camera to go wrong. When this happens your camera feed starts wobbling around all the time. This happened to a friend of mine and let’s just say his snapchat stories had a very distinctive look :)

I’m not sure whether more expensive mounts do a better job with this (I think his was quite cheap) but make sure to do your research if you’re planning on using it a lot, and you care about your phone’s camera.

If you can afford it, I think the Librem 5 is the best linux-first phone at the moment. Both it and the PinePhone Pro are roughly as fast as each other, but the Librem 5 has a much more premium feel, and the hardware kill switches are much more accessible, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Back in the day, when the Librem 5 was $1000+, it was a no-brainer for the PinePhone Pro, but I feel it is much more reasonable to recommend the Librem 5 now.

You can make it work as a daily driver, but I wouldn’t want to depend on it for life and death situations. Calling generally doesn’t work very well - either one side can’t hear the other, or the audio quality is too quiet, or not very good. It’s probably possible to fix if you know what you’re doing, but I don’t know what I’m doing :)

I carry around a dumbphone and a SIM removal tool, so that I can call someone if I really need to. If you’re happy to do that, I feel it gives you the best of both worlds.

Otherwise, one alternative is to be an Android-first device, that has good support in PostmarketOS, e.g. the Oneplus 6/6T. Mobile Linux has had such an impact on these devices that the price of these on eBay has gone up in some areas over time :D

Good luck!

They have also funded a lot of improvements to XMPP clients and servers.

I’d like to second Snikket - it’s designed for this use case and is very simple to set up.

If you’d rather not use Snikket, check out these recommendations for clients and servers.

Hope it works for you! Feel free to reach out if you have any questions.

Now: terrorists are terrorists, right wing rioters are terrorists, climate protestors are terrorists and misogynistic people are terrorists.

Soon: asylum seekers are terrorists, people who go on strike are terrorists, members of the opposition party are terrorists.

I support reducing violence against women, but prevent is the wrong tool for this problem. If the government actually want to address this instead of just looking like they are, I feel they should take an approach that actually works. We need:

• More consistent and holistic sex education, from a younger age
• Explicitly teaching about sexual violence, the services available and the punishments for doing it
• Investing in local policing, so that there is bandwidth to look into these cases
• Giving more funding to charities who support domestic abuse survivors
• Training for police, so they actually listen to women when they raise concerns at an earlier stage, instead of waiting until it’s too late
• Tougher sentencing for any form of sexual violence

Prevent is both ineffective and discriminatory. It increases government surveillance, and raises the burden on GPs and teachers. The National Union of Teachers want to get rid of it, the Communities and Local Government Committee found a multitude of problems that haven’t been fixed, and human rights orgs like Liberty and Amnesty International want to get rid of it too. It doesn’t work and in many cases has made things worse.

Thank you for taking the time to write this, LibRedirect is so much better!

Unfortunately, I think it just picks randomly. I have had times where it has redirected me to an instance that is down. That said, if you have an instance you know is stable, it does give you a drop-down to always redirect to a specific one.

For me, it’s many of the ones people have already said, plus:

• StreetPass (seriously cool - collects the mastodon profile of any website you visit where someone has set up the special link to their profile)
• Video Speed Controller (gives you fine-grained control over video speed, e.g. watching video at 2.6x speed)
• Privacy redirect (automatically redirects to various services, e.g. from Twitter to Nitter - can select a random instance each time)

I’m very sympathetic to this blog post, as it nicely describes why I use XMPP.

But, on a related note, I have noticed an interesting pattern where people talk past each other a little, especially when conflating user freedom and security.

If I’m to generalise, I feel the outlook of XMPP users tends to be more systemic and long-term. We’ve seen how chat networks come and go, we’ve seen the dangers of companies promising to serve your interests whilst also being a chokepoint of centralisation. So we tend to de-emphasize papercuts or current issues in clients and the protocol, on the basis that we have the power to fix them if we want to.

I feel that’s shown in this blog post - all the points come back to the benefits of user freedom: no one entity controls you, the protocol serves you, you can choose your own clients, and if you don’t like it, you can always switch / write your own!

What I’ve seen is that the people who gravitate towards Signal tend to be more concerned with the here and now - e.g. “how do I get my friend off telegram onto a secure / private service”. I feel in many cases that making arguments about federation and the structure of the network won’t sway them, as they’ll always be able to point to some area where the clients are deficient in the here and now (depending on their interests - papercuts in the clients, different versions of OMEMO being used across the network etc).

I don’t really have a solution to this, but I think all we can do is continue to make the clients and servers as good as they can possibly be. I always encourage anyone I manage to migrate to XMPP to send me any annoyances they find in the apps, so that they can eventually be fixed. We need to be ready for when Telegram, Signal, WhatsApp etc. abuse their power, because (as we’ve seen from the fediverse) that’s the only time that “regular people” will care for the arguments that we’re making about federation and user freedom.

Agreed, it’s licensed under the MPL, a “weak copyleft” license. Each file that is MPL must remain MPL, but other files in the same project can be permissive or even proprietary.

While I definitely think it’s better than a fully permissive license, it seems more permissive than the LGPL, which is the main license of WebKit and Blink. So I don’t feel it’s strong enough to stop it being co-opted.

I really wish there was a GPL-licensed rendering engine and browser, accepting community funding, with some momentum behind it.

I feel Ladybird have correctly identified the problem - that all major browsers and engines (including Firefox) get their primary source of funding from Google, and thus ads. And the donations and attention they’ve received show that there is real demand for an alternative.

But I think the permissive license they have chosen means history will repeat itself. KHTML being licensed under the LGPL made it easy for Google to co-opt, since it was so much easier to incorporate into a proprietary (or more permissively licensed) codebase.

There is Netsurf, but the rendering engine understandably and unfortunately lags behind the major ones. I just wish it was possible to gather support and momentum behind it to the same extent that Ladybird has achieved.

Different strokes for different folks! I’ve been fortunate enough that many of my family and friends have been happy enough to follow me.

But I don’t disagree with you, Signal has a much more recognisable brand and better user experience. These are things that we need to improve if we’re going to get anywhere near the level of adoption Signal has.