I have been this last week. Very cool. I even built a keyboard for Sailfish OS.

Yeah. It’s thoroughly documented tho & nothing seems over-the-top. They also contribute to upstreams. A lot of folks use GitLab despite it only being open core. Every day I have to interact with Microsoft GitHub which is fully proprietary & they do nothing but inject social media nonsense to the platform & train on your data just to sell it back to you. Yet rarely does anyone complain about them being it the middle of free software, & instead they move all comms to the black hole of Discord. Meanwhile Google is no longer doing Android in the open.

I don’t think what Jolla is doing is evil—you just have to play by stupid capitalist rules to be a ‘viable business’ in this economy to keep the lights on. They used to have more stuff open IIRC, but it can be hard to do in practice if you are picking a niche taking on a duopoly.

Sailfish OS exists right now as a Linux mobile OS with their own hardware (& supports the Sony Xperia line as well—which have microSD & headphone jacks …which no GrapheneOS devices support 🙃)

I would say the same & I don’t even use it—but I would trust it being around the longest & is better than GNOME IMO.

I use aerc thru home-manager accounts on NixOS

Being able to have a decentralized form to accept patches is key to keeping the D in DVCS (distributed version control system). Pijul you can omit the email & even name if you want to be anonymous, or your key servers could offer better forms of communication.

I totally disagree with letting Microsoft GitHub be a sink for email. Not only is it US-based, publicly-traded with shareholders to appease, & fully proprietary… but they are also a major data siphon with Copilot™ products trained on then sold back from code & conversation in what should The Commons which probably include these no replies. We are also talking about a massively centralizing platform saying omitting your email is fine since you can direct your contributors to use their closed, proprietary platform—something anyone with any sympathy for free software ethos or even basic privacy for contributors would never demand, endorse, or encourage the usage of MS GitHub in any form.

Pijul decouples your identity from you commits & proves your SSH key ownership. It is a beautiful thing that you can change your name or email & not have to get a force push to update all that info since you are now just identified by the primary key from the identity server. No more worries about being embarrassed by your old Protonmail or GMail account,no more dead names in the commit history, & no care about identity stealing by just changing the config.

You are really gonna want something beyond Markdown if you are taking anything other than the most basic of notes. Markdown lacks so, so many features & you will likely end up buying into some incompatible fork like the one behind Obsidian.

& abduco can work if you only need attach/detach

K. Have fun doing nothing & sticking to your shitty networks that give you no control or freedom—as opposed to trying literally anything to change the situation.

So you are saying we should all use Reddit, Discord, Meta WhatsApp, & Microsoft GitHub since more folks are there? The only way to buck those trends is to be the change you want to see & slowly move what groups you can away. You don’t have to get everything to buy in at once & there are mirrors / gateways that you can use as a transition. Make a clan homepage & say the VoIP is here & the chat is there… now you aren’t beholden to one specific tool going to shit or waiting 10 years for something to have literally every feature you want. If 2 applications is a barrier, maybe that someone isn’t the right fit for your group anyhow.

For the chat part: IRCv3, XMPP, Jami, maybe SimpleX.

As it stands for VoIP: Mumble, Jitsi (XMPP), Jami, maybe Movim (XMPP) in the near-ish future.

IRC & Mumble is centralized but super lightweight so you can spin up a server on any old hardware & can be fine for ‘clans’. Clients are efficient too. They aren’t encrypted other than TLS but are good enough for its largely-room-based goals.

XMPP is a generalized, decentralized protocol for presence & messaging. It has multiple FOSS servers that require a potato for hardware that you can spin up in a bedroom to join other bedroom servers where you can control your own data (same as Matrix, but a lot less resources & more mature). Chat can be encrypted (most clients support PGP & OMEMO). Some clients can do voice/video calls, many are working on multi-user call at present. It is the protocol behind WhatsApps, Zoom, Fortnite, League of Legends, & more.

Jami is P2P IIRC, but I haven’t used it—so I won’t comment.

But you can use a chat service for chat & a VoIP service for VoIP & that can be fine. A kitchen sink isn’t always the best approach.

But if you are looking to keep tabs on something, Movim is very much focused on multi-user jingle & is something you could deploy & have decentralized users join from their own servers.

Bad idea. Matrix is incredibly costly to run by design. The eventual consistency model replicates everything to all servers which is wasteful, slow, & isn’t going to scale. Many medium-sized servers have shut down for storage & CPU+RAM costs—which causes refugees to seek more centralized nodes. Hell, we saw it a couple weeks ago Matrix begging for money since they can’t even afford to run their own servers anymore. You should put your money into a protocol that doesn’t treat chat like a blockchain & is efficient enough to reasonably self-host.

Doesn’t have a cup holder either! Why does ever alternative need to have every feature or it can’t be called an alternative? Does your VoIP app need the ability to send videos? Can you not use something else in tandem to do the more social side? Sometimes it’s better to focus on one thing & do it well—especially under-resourced like free software often is. You could argue just as easily these other features as bloat if you don’t want or use them.

AUR has a lot of packages but still nowhere near as much as Nixpkgs

Sometimes a hyphenated adjective

We can & should demand at least gateways & mirrors if not at least a single alternative. Considering they have funding, they can self-host to actually control a forum or chat room as well as a code mirror (even if just HTTP with no forge). Folks are also undervaluing how some users are banned from access to these US-based platforms under US sanctions.

So? Not everything is packaged on all distros & you can benefit from sharing & reusing declarative configuration even if for specific scopes (meaning not just NixOS).

The pro-FOSS stance would be to get your communications off of being exclusively proprietary platforms. Developer & early adopter freedom & privacy matters—but instead they are choosing Discord & Microsoft GitHub as their only platforms.