danielspace23

This is an apples-to-oranges comparison

Problem (1) is a keyboard problem, not a GrapheneOS problem. Graphene comes with the stock AOSP keyboard which is very basic, but you can absolutely replace it. Personally I'm using the FUTO Keyboard and it does have that feature, as well as swiping, speech to text and much more.

Maybe you can try installing another SMS app for problem (2)? Much like the stock keyboard, the stock Messaging app is just the AOSP app. Honestly it works fine for me so I don't have a recommendation.

What do tourists in trains have to do with population caps? Tourists are not registered citizens, they exist regardless of population caps.

I think that, more than EU metasearch engines, we need EU search indexes. EUSP is already something, but they seem to be working rather slowly, compared to how quickly Brave built their own index.

It's also trivial to run a perfectly working metasearch engine with the same sources as Uruky, it's called Searxng.

In any case, good luck on this project. I personally don't think it's for me. Maybe a better user interface would change the equation, but as of now I'll stick to Qwant.

The whole thing seems a lot like AI slop for SEO. The demo websites look incredibly AI-generated, they don't even resemble the 90s web that well. The project description/README has all the signs of being AI, too.

I think they're trying to get some sympathy (and promotion) with a project that seems inherently human, as the "old web" was, but it's slop all the way down. And people are falling for it.

Personally, I think the client looks cool, but the problem with Matrix has never been client-side, it's more like the entire protocol is bad at doing what it aims to do.

With GLM and Kimi getting better and better, with both still providing low-cost coding plans with higher quotas, and with how trivial it is to switch to them even within Claude CLI, I'm not sure what makes Anthropic think their users would rather pay 5x than switch to the competition.

Piracy Shield only works within Italy. No provider has ever been expected to take down sites globally in response to a Piracy Shield trigger, or has ever done so.

Also read the start of the comment. See this?

as much as I think Piracy Shield shouldn't exist

I'm Italian, and as much as I think Piracy Shield shouldn't exist, I find hard to empathize with Cloudflare, especially after this tweet.

First off, the immediate appeal to Vance and Musk is embarrassing. I believe he knows he's technically in the wrong for not abiding to the law, so gathering the sympathy of the "freedom fighters" of the web is all he can do. But the funniest part about this tweet are the "threats" he makes towards Italy.

In addition, we are considering the following actions: ... discontinuing Cloudflare’s Free cyber security services for any Italy-based users

He phrases it to be as if the free tier is a favor Cloudflare does to the world, as if it's not obviously a loss-leader designed to get more people into the Cloudflare ecosystem.

Removing all servers from Italian cities

This is my favorite by far. Does he think that this will start a popular uprising? My take is that when Italian customers notice their ping going up by 10x because all their traffic is now routed through France, they will switch to BunnyCDN, Fastly or any of the dozens of CDNs that do have servers in Italy.

In this political climate, Cloudflare siding with the current administration's general line of "we're Americans, our economy is strong so we're above international law" sends a message I don't think they fully understand. I hope this ends up as being a push for independent European cloud.

The PKM I've been using lately, SiYuan, does exactly that, and I think their business model isn't bad: the client is fully FOSS, there are some client-side paid features with a one-time subscription (WebDAV/S3 sync "bring your own server") and some server-side paid features with a more expensive recurring subscription (cloud space provided by them).

I don't particularly like client-side paid features, but:

- The client is fully FOSS, you can just patch the license check out. In fact, there are some forks on GitHub that do just that and provide binaries, and the authors don't seem to care, they even acknowledged them on Twitter (https://x.com/b3logos/status/1928366043094724937).

- There are plugins to sync without a paid plan

This works out quite well for them: if you choose a fork or a sync plugin, you don't get the same support that paying users do, so many users still end up buying a license. But you don't need to, which makes the whole thing not user-hostile.

I have bought a one-time license myself, and I'm very happy that I'm supporting the development of a FOSS project.

Fyne is an interesting library, and although I'm sure it can do a good job on the desktop, last time I tried it I was disappointed by how "meh" it works on mobile (Android in my case).

It does run, but I feel like it's more of a prototyping tool, or a tool for building internal apps. It's kinda slow, graphically inconsistent with the rest of Android, and it has little to no support for features like foreground services, the camera, and more.

I really hope they can improve, but with limited resources and funding, and such a wide scope, I'm not sure if they will ever be ready for more complex projects. In any case, best of luck to the devs!

How is that a good thing? Are we, as a society, forgetting the value of diversification, or just ignoring it because convenience is good? Do you really want to be just one wrongful ban away from being completely offline?

Just an fyi for everyone: while Tangled is built partly on top of ATProto, it differs from its component architecture widely, as the tasks that should be done by the AppView are offloaded to "knots", self-hostable servers specific to Tangled that do most of the Git heavy lifting. It violates the "user data stays on the PDS" principle, as repo data stay on knots, not in PDSes. As far as I know, no other ATProto application has a similiar architecture.

So, a marketing video made by a random guy and uploaded to TikTok, which was then removed from TikTok as they found it to be in violation with their policies, is somehow TikTok's fault?

Don't you think they would have kept the video up if they really had a "mission to sow dissent in free western countries"?

Do you have any source that can prove this kind of video exists not because people like dark humor, but because of a deeper conspiracy?

After reading their blatant misinformation on Android support (https://www.iceblock.app/android, which makes no sense as explained in https://bsky.app/profile/grapheneos.org/post/3lswujex4e22w), and seeing their refusal to publish the source code, I can't help but wonder if it's an honeypot.

Have you considered Anubis? I know it's harder to install, but personally, I think the point of Mastodon is trying to avoid centralization where possible, and CloudFlare is one of the corporations that are keeping the internet centralized.

What's your argument here? That if you don't pay you shouldn't get a decent user experience, and paying solves every issue so we might as well give into the enshittification?

The SponsorBlock and DeArrow argument only works some times: clickbait and sponsors can be an indicator of poor quality (see Linus Tech Tips), but they aren't always: even Tom Scott video thumbnails and titles used to get DeArrowed, and I bet no one here would argue that Tom Scott used to push low quality content.

I honestly can't wrap my head around what some users do just to have the "stock" experience.

In order to get a vaguely usable stock YouTube, you need to install at least UBlock, SponsorBlock, No Translation, and arguably DeArrow as well. And this only works for browsers, many people will cope with their mobile YouTube experience being hell on earth. Why do all this when you can get an alternative cross-platform client like GrayJay with all the same features (minus DeArrow for now), which works out of the box, has more privacy, and won't be completely useless the next time Google decides to shift things around a bit?

Same goes for Windows: you'll see people who go to great lengths to disable telemetry, remove Edge and sponsored content, often having to run random scripts from the internet with administrator privileges, just to have everything reset on the next Windows update. Remember how Windows users made fun of Linux users for having to open a command line for installing a browser (which isn't even true)?

I could go on: you can get Firefox and spend hours tweaking about:config to disable the anti-features, or you can get one of the dozen forks with the same patches pre-applied, yet some people will still defend the stock experience with their lives.

In recent news from the "land of the free": a Norwegian tourist was detained by ICE and denied entry at Newark Airport for having a funny picture of JD Vance on his phone.

You can claim what you want about freedom of speech being guaranteed in the USA, but the reality shows that it only applies for some people.

https://www.nordlys.no/mads-sin-drommereise-til-usa-spolert-...

I have mixed feelings about DeltaChat.

It's cool that it uses email, but it's also not. Email is a notoriously painful standard to run a server for. I have ran a Matrix and Mastodon server, and I'm still running a BlueSky PDS, but I've never even tried to run an email server, since I know I'll get blocked the moment I try it for having a residential IP, and that it's a lot of work.

So most people will be stuck with commercial providers, with the largest happening to be Google, which needs users to set up an app password for DeltaChat to work. You've already lost most users at that point. Other large providers don't work or require setups: https://providers.delta.chat/

Then there's ChatMail relays, which are supposedly interoperable with email, but from the documentation it's very unclear to what extent that is. Not to mention that the possibility of them getting blacklisted by mainstream providers is very high, as they do text message analysis which doesn't work on encrypted blobs.

At this point, I have to ask: is email the right tool for the job? With all these drawbacks, it seems it would have been better to go with another standard, written from scratch.

BlueSky sorta has a solution to the problem: a feed called "Quiet posters", that only gives you the posts from the least active users in your timeline. It's not the perfect solution, but it works for me.

It would be if it existed.

According to a February 2022 report by the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS), a social credit "score" is a myth as there is "no score that dictates citizen's place in society" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System

"Quality over quantity" is a thing, especially for individuals as opposed to large publishing groups. Personally, I find that the people who post less on their blog, BlueSky account or YouTube produce the best content over their peers. I enjoy a Folding Ideas video infinitely more times more than the garbage Linus Tech Tips pumps out every day.

XMPP in its current state is a mess. The bare protocol is minimal, the things which actually make the thing usable are just a bunch of extensions, barely glued onto the thing, which means that there are clients that implement different features, and you never know if whatever you send will be supported by the receiver (including encryption).

There are a gazillion clients for Android, mostly forks of Conversations implementing slightly different extensions, but like the upstream they fail at being enjoyable to use. I have not found a decent desktop client as of my last attempt.

I seriously think that XMPP is one of the best examples of why the "write protocols, not apps" approach has failed. Without an actual, complete and cohesive reference implementation, that others follow with theirs, there will always be a fragmentation like this, which will always ruin any attempt at mainstream adoption.

possibly

not speculative

So it is speculative, right? Even your comment is just speculation.

I remember trying it out several years ago, when I was experimenting with hosting my website for the first times. The UX was terrible just as it is now, and I ended up never actually using it for much.

I then went on to try https://biz.nf, and I think they belong to the same category - free web hosting, provided by actual profit-driven corporations as opposed to orgs/collectives such as NeoCities, which seems to be stuck in time. Both continue to work in 2025, neither offers free HTTPS (which means those sites won't even open by default on most modern browsers), not much is known on who runs them, and neither has upgraded their graphics in (tens of?) years. But they do work.

I still have my Biz.NF account. I don't actually use it - the lack of SSL is a deal breaker for any potential serious use one might have - but I log into it from time to time, when I'm feeling nostalgic. There's something so charming about it, it's hard to explain. It might be the early 2000s web design aesthetic, with the cartoonish clip-art icons, heavy shadows and gradient backgrounds. Or it might be the memory of those times, when I thought that anything I could think of, I could develop, with my silly little free web hosting account.

I can't convince myself on how these sites still exist. Sure, they provide abysmal specs for the free tier, and they're quick to ban everything that they think is abuse. But they have staff, including the support agent who kindly explained to 13y/o me that the free tier doesn't allow your PHP scripts to fetch external resources, and the people taking care of the actual servers, providing support for the latest PHP versions, and more.

I'm fully convinced that these hosts will not be here in 10 years. It simply can't work. Biz.NF has paid services, but they're overpriced when compared to almost everything else. You can't convince me they're much profitable. Even their free hosting offerings are outdated - most of the comments here are talking about better alternatives. Biz.NF has recently discontinued the free website builder, without announcing any replacement. FreeWHA runs entirely on outdated software, and most features have been "coming soon" since before 2017.

They're probably the sites that best allow people to experience the "dead mall vibe" on the Internet (alongside Decentraland, for Folding Ideas fans). To me they feel like they're just going by inertia, surviving off of a handful of paid subscribers, some of which have probably forgotten they're subscribed at all.

At some point, some random guy is going to decide they can't be bothered to keep the lights on anymore - as little as that electricity bill might cost - and that will be the end for this corner of web history. And just like when I read in the news that the mall where I used to go as a child was closing down, I'm going to be sad when I receive the email of Biz.NF's end of service.

Why are you spreading misinformation? There's plenty of Chinese gay influencers on RedNote and there have been for years [0], saying LGBTQ talk there is banned is nonsensical. The ban waves are probably due to the app struggling to scale moderation to handle all the new people, including the ones disrespectful of Chinese societal norms.

[0] https://www.xiaohongshu.com/search_result?keyword=gay (requires log-in)

There's plenty of openly gay Chinese RedNote influencers, as there have been for years now [1]. I don't know why you're pushing disinformation. The Americans getting banned probably just violated their ToS, since they were in Chinese and they couldn't understand them.

[1] https://www.xiaohongshu.com/search_result?keyword=gay (requires log-in)

RSS and the lack of algorithms may sound nice, until you subscribe to the feed of a couple of media outlets, and see the content of the independent creators that post less often get buried under a truckload of "stuff you're vaguely interested in".

BlueSky kinda addresses this issue with Feeds. I follow the people that post at a frequency that I know won't flood my main feed, then I have pinned a separate feed for news, another for photos of foxes and one for photos of cats. The app randomly inserts posts from those feeds into the main one (if you have enbaled "Show samples from your saved feeds" in https://bsky.app/settings/following-feed), so as I'm scrolling my "Following" feed, I also get some of that content, while keeping the main usable.

You can find used Pixels almost anywhere (I know because I'm using one), which saves you from giving money to Google.

About software support, isn't that true for all devices and all manufacturers? Google guarantees 7 years of android updates and security patches, which is way better than most competitors, and Graphene adds in some years of extended support.

Not to mention that once all support is over, if you don't care about the fact that firmware, kernel and vendor code will never be updated, you can still switch to LineageOS, which still has nightly builds even for the first Pixel with extremely updated security patches.

The only valid point is that hardware is controlled by Google. There could be some sort of extremely-low-level backdoor or spyware, and we would never know. That's also true of each and every other CPU, modem or device with vendor-specific code.