It seems I didn’t communicate my reason for having Instagram well enough. I don’t have access to the “feed” or following people (it won’t load unless I accept some terms, which I won’t). I have an account with the messaging function bridged to my Matrix account, which lets me receive messages and (when it works) reply to them to organize moving to a better platform.

It’s the best solution I found if I want to keep contact with people I meet when going out or traveling. Phone numbers barely work (I still can’t call or message any German numbers, never found out why), and everyone I meet has Instagram. I just give them my username, they can add me easily, and then later over Instagram direct messages we figure out how to get them signed up for Matrix or Signal.

I’m personally trapped on Discord and Instagram.

Discord is required by my workplace, so no way of getting rid of it until everyone decides to move to something better. I have some friends on it too, but most of them also made Matrix accounts when I explained I won’t be very reachable on Discord (I only open it when necessary; and it doesn’r run on my phone since they rewrote the app in JS). I have Instagram as a way to people I meet during travel or events to “add me” easily, and then we can figure out a good way to communicate afterward. I’m not too bothered by having it as I don’t use it daily or anything.

While degoogling is accessible right now, what worries me is that all of these projects are 100% dependent on Google’s whims because they use Android as the upstream. Same reason why I don’t use Chromium browsers: yes, they can patch over things, but they can’t fight the direction of the upstream project and they are powerless if the upstream stops publishing commits / source, like Google seems to be moving toward. Additionally, what “the big distros” aka stock ROMs do to prevent FOSS apps being installed means a much much smaller potential userbase for them. I develop an Android app, and (while I don’t have analytics) I don’t find it unlikely that at least half my users are on stock roms that would lose access to my app with this policy. It’s much less motivating to develop something when I know less people will benefit, and especially knowing I’m supporting only custom roms that are 100% beholden to Google. Degoogling is a good first step. I’ve been on Lineage for many years now. But I believe that the step that will truly make us independent is moving to Linux phones.

Cool! Perhaps I’ll give Qwant another shot. Thanks for sharing :)

Very cool, but this is old news from 2024. I wonder how they’re doing now.

Happened to me too, I was so confused. I hope it is a bug… EDIT: Found the report: https://gitlab.com/relan/fennecbuild/-/issues?show=eyJpaWQiOiIxMjAiLCJmdWxsX3BhdGgiOiJyZWxhbi9mZW5uZWNidWlsZCIsImlkIjoxNjk5MTU5NTd9

I don’t have any advice to give but I want to thank you for considering this angle while building the website.

but why?

You can kinda get autofill via a program called rofi-rbw on Wayland desktops (using wtype), but I found at least on Hyprland it often misses the field or the start of the password. I’d like to see a more consistent solution but definitely not via the official Electron app…

I’m using a reMarkable Linux tablet and it’s been awesome. There’s a bunch of apps ported to it if you’re okay with using an older software release, and they give you full root access. Not FOSS or open hardware like Pine64 but really good experience and does not feel too limited.

I use this and love it! I can’t remember whether it was a “FairEmail Pro” feature though (one-time donation to unlock pro features). Regardless it works great.

I self host Whoogle and it’s a really nice interface. However, recently is has started to take longer and longer to load, sometimes giving up and returning a 502 error. If you don’t run into that however, it’s super nice!

If you just need to get updates from accounts, there are Mastodon services that auto-mirror Twitter accounts. I use bird.makeup to follow a few gamedevs that have yet to move.

I use Bitwarden and, though all the features are very nice (self hosted Vaultwarden), the clients are really bad. The autofill is super inconsistent on Android. The app takes 20s+ to load on my Pixel 3a. You can’t trigger a sync from the quick autofill menu, you have to open the full app. The “desktop app” is just an embedded browser. I really want to like it, but it doesn’t make it easy.

I don’t understand where and how I need to file complaints. I live in France and Belgium, and have encountered several large and popular websites which enforce a “cookie wall”. This does not appear to respect the cookie law.

I’m really looking forward to seeing it actually applied. I hope it uses Matrix for interop as I understand it would make bridges an official “feature” rather than a TOS-breaking unreliable hack. I hope it gets applied to Discord as well, since my university requires me to be in their guild so I’ve had to create an account and install the app. I also hope to see calls covered, so I can call people from Matrix who are on Facebook Messenger, for example.

Any keyboard with no internet permission should be “privacy-respecting”, as it can’t (as I understand it) send any data back to the developers. I’m personally a big fan of Unexpected Keyboard, though it’s definitely something to get used to.