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Cake day: Jun 28, 2023

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The Google Pixel 4a is officially end-of-life and doesn’t get any software and security updates anymore (https://endoflife.date/pixel).


Looks like Discord will do a Reddit in the near future.

I recommend switching to Matrix.


You don’t install the apps “sandboxed”. You can install the Google services like any normal app (in the “Apps” app). The Google services will then only have very limited permissions, for example they won’t be able to see your location, camera, contacts etc. by default and you can grant these permissions like to any other app.

The only thing that changes is that you have the option to install Google services and that you have the option to grant them permissions they would have limitlessly on a “normal” Android phone.

Your four mentioned apps should work on GrapheneOS without any problems, the only apps I had difficulties with were banking apps. The Google Play Store won’t be installed by default though, so you will need to install it in the “Apps” app. (I recommend using F-Droid to find alernative apps, although you won’t find something like Clash Royale on there. If you don’t want to use a Google account, you may want to look into Aurora Store (it provides anonymous access to the Play Store), which is also available of F-Droid)

I personally still use Firefox (Mull to be exact), because Vanadium doesn’t seem to have any good way of blocking ads. I found this on the internet in some R*ddit comment:

Chromium-based browsers like Vanadium and Bromite provide the strongest sandbox implementation, leagues ahead of the alternatives. It is much harder to escape from the sandbox and it provides much more than acting as a barrier to compromising the rest of the OS.

(Long version of the above quote: https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing)


If you only need music streaming, then a service like Navidrome may be better.


“World IDs are issued on the Worldcoin protocol, which allows individuals to prove that they are human to any verifier (including web2 applications) while maintaining their privacy through zero-knowledge proofs.”

“The Orb uses multispectral sensors to verify humanness and uniqueness to issue an Orb-verified World ID, with all images being promptly deleted on-device per default” Whitepaper

I guess that the information is somehow encrypted. The whitepaper doesn’t really seem to explain how a website can verify that the “World ID” is owned by a real human. Does the blockchain prohibit an individual from creating multiple World IDs? The World App doesn’t seem to collect any official PII, except an E-Mail address and a phone number, which you can have multiple of.

If you can create multiple World IDs, which are anonymous (at least the whitepaper and the Google Play Store says so), then bots could also just use a World ID to “verify” that they are human. The whitepaper is really shallow and doesn’t explain some of the most important aspects of verification.

You get an “anonymous” ID, which is created by biometrics, which are “promptly” deleted after creation of the ID. By that logic it is impossible to stop individuals from creating multiple IDs, except everyone’s state-issued identity is recorded and saved on a central server, which is bad privacy-wise.


I recommend viewing an instance as someone’s house/home. If you create an account on someone’s instance, you need to abide by their rules, because you are their guest. You can’t go to someone and expect them to tolerate everything you say/do.

If you can’t find an instance that tolerates your views, you should create one which does. That is the great thing about decentralization. If you don’t want to create a home for your views or don’t like decentralization, you should stay on corporate social media, which you can see as a public square. Everyone can join and say what thay want and they only get banned if they get too loud.

The “official” Fediverse is mainly used by a certain type of individuals who hold specific views about love, life and politics. It is not designed to be a public square and it is made easy to filter out opinions you don’t like.

By your other comments I think that you hold conservative values about the world. There are/were instances for conservative opinions, but they don’t/didn’t federate at all. Maybe that’s the reason you can’t find any people supporting your views. Parler.com for example used a Mastodon server as a base for their social media network, but they never enabled federation.

Another example might be gab.com, which is still active and used by many conservative people.