SimpleX is not suitable for larger group chats.

XMPP has a few quite popular privacy related public channels: https://search.jabber.network/search?q=privacy

(For those unaware: xmpp participant counts are actively connected users, not like Matrix or Discord that counts who ever joined the room years ago and never came back).

Hmm, that doesn’t sound like my issue. As soon as I turn on SteamVR the sound goes haywire. I can still use other headphones fine without any issue, but the built in ones have distorted sound with SteamVR running (but not when I turn that off).

No problems with the built in headphones? I can’t get them to sound right… there seems to be some sort of samplerate shift as soon as I start SteamVR with my HTC Vive Pro.

Ah, I was hoping to hear about experiences with the PSVR2 on Linux. Too bad it doesn’t fully work yet. But that it is only a problem with the app might mean Monado support is possible.

Yeah, Occulus and Linux are not the best friends. There are some work arounds to make it somewhat work with SteamVR, but don’t expect too much.

My recommendation would be to look for a second hand Valve Index or HTC Vive if using it on Linux is your priority.

Or wait for the rumored new standalone headset from Valve, but that will probably not happen before end of 2025 if at all.

It would be ok, but a bit lonely, no?

Better look into Snikket.

You can use https://webxdc.org/ apps with XMPP or Deltachat and shared grocery or task lists are a common use-case.

There are some clients that support the latest version of OMEMO, but yes, since the most popular ones do not, you end up using the older version most of the time. That said, the older version is not generally unsafe, it basically is the same as WhatsApp or Signal are using. The newer version is just somewhat better as it includes some lessons learned from earlier attempts.

E2ee is not everything, as most of the privacy sensitive metadata can still be collected. Sure it is nice to have, but even more important is that you can chose a trustworthy server operator or run your own. XMPP allows doing that, but it has some weaknesses with client implementations and so on.

I am a bit biased and would say all in all XMPP is probably the best option right now, but it depends on your specific priorities. It certainly has some rough edges though.

It would be also really useful to have a database of oil company executives and other shitty people that aren’t easy to recognize but worth refusing service etc.

CoreCtrl might also work.

Huh, it was still working when I posted it one hour ago… unlucky I guess 🤷‍♂️

There is https://hypersomnia.xyz/ but it is 2D top down. Pretty tactical though.

It’s likely Cloudflare related. Some of the larger instances are behind that, but many of the smaller ones aren’t. Cloudflare isn’t only a problem for VPN users, so its a good idea to avoid those instances as a user. You can still interact with their communities via Federation.

No, they found some billionaires to do it 😉

Has a strong smell of: https://xkcd.com/1172/

No, if your system can’t support 3rd party clients properly, it is inherently insecure, especially in an e2ee context where you supposedly don’t have to trust the server/vendor. If a system claims to be e2ee, but tightly controls both clients and servers (for example WhatsApp), that means they can rug-pull that e2ee at any point in time and even selectively target people with custom updates to break that e2ee for them only. The only way to realistically protect yourself from that is using a 3rd party client (and yes, I know, in case of Signal also theoretically reviewing every code change and using reproducible builds, but that’s not very realistic).

Now admittedly, Signal has started to be less hostile to 3rd party clients like Molly, so it’s not as bad anymore as it used to be.

Loads of people working for these companies are also on special visas that have been described as modern slavery… so maybe they are culpable of signing up for such jobs/visas, but once you are in such a setup the threat of immediate deportation to some 3rd world country is quite real.

There is the MLS standard now that was explicitly developed with e2ee group chat applications in mind. From what I have read so far, this new standard seems well regarded by cryptography experts.

Telegram’s encryption isn’t open source, so no one can verify it’s soundness or risks.

This is not true, it is available in the open-source Telegram clients.

What you probably mean is that it is using an unusual and not well studied encryption algorithm. This means you need to be a real cryptography expert to spot flaws in it.

Telegram justifies this with a bit of FUD about well known encryption algorithm being NSA sponsored etc, but when cryptography experts did look at Telegram’s homegrown algorithm they were less than impressed.

It’s their community blog. This specific person has been writing there about Linux gaming for a long time now.

There is a channel search engine, but yes for now XMPP is more of an alternative to Whatsapp or Signal for 1:1 communication or small group-chats. If you are looking for public channels the best is to join IRC channels via the very nice Biboumi gateway for XMPP.

There is an active project to enable MLS on XMPP right now, funded by Nlnet. Not many details yet, but from the little that is known it sounds quite promising.

When did you last try XMPP? There are some reasonably modern looking clients these days and encryption certainly works better than on Matrix.

Well, on Android they are very much “on the level of other modern chat apps” and Monal has improved a lot in recent months 🤷‍♂️

What exactly do you expect from mobile clients? I personally find them among the best, as they work well, look reasonably nice and use very little battery. Monocles and Cheogram are nice for Android (both free on F-droid) and Monal is ok for iOS.

Both Dino and Gajim are modern looking and easy to use XMPP desktop clients.

I wonder if there is an AI scraper block list I could add to Suricata 🤔

Try launching KDE in X11 instead of Wayland.

Nvidia is known to have all sorts of graphical issues on Wayland in all but the most recent versions of KDE which likely isn’t available in your distro yet.

Edit: ah, not Nvidia? You can still try on X11, as some programs also have issues with xwayland.

for a AGPL-only project.

Citation needed. It is undisputed that the software that runs on their servers is not identical to the code they release; if they release at all because sometimes they just stop for a year, until people complain 🫠

This is false. You still need a phone number to sign up and it is used as an internal identifier.

All they did is to allow you to hide your phone number from other users.

After ignoring it because Epic sucks, I recently realised that https://heroicgameslauncher.com/ is a really nice GOG client as well.

Like basically every German news outlet? And this is already being contested in courts as some German data protection agencies (falsely IMHO) ruled this as valid.

You must have an odd selection of games. For me, 90% of the time I just click play on Steam and it works.

A common thing in continental Europe too. NOYB and some EU lawmakers are trying to make these pay-or-ok schemes illegal, but I guess in the UK you will be out of luck regarding that.

That’s not quite how Taler works. Yes, the exchange will know when you generate Taker tokens from fiat, but that is similar to going to an ATM and getting cash. Afterwards the exchange has no means to track what you spend the tokens on.

The GDPR applies to both EU and non-EU citizens. What matters is that the organisation has activities in EU countries, but IANAL.

The German coop-bank that is part of the current pilot project has recently stated that if everything goes according to plan they will begin offering it before the end of this year.

Taler is not centralised. I think you are thinking of CBDC?

Taler could be described as semi-centralized at best. You are free to chose your exchange and you can easily use multiple the same time. It really isn’t that different to crypto-currencies in that regard if you consider the need of fiat exchanges for real world use there as well.

🙄 you have obviously no idea what you are talking about.