You 100% should.

I bought a second-hand Pixel, installed GrapheneOS the moment it arrived and never looked back.

I recently installed Curve for contactless NFC payments. Their support is terrible but, after some teething issues, it works without any problems.

Hosted on GCP?

Well, duh.

Element is UK and EU-based, not US-based.

I run a complete, self-hosted Matrix stack including bridges to WhatsApp, Slack, Telegram and Signal as well as Element Call (Livekit) and MAS (the new authentication system).

I don’t think there’s any shortcuts. You just need to install them and work through any issues, one-by-one. Start with just the homeserver (Synapse, don’t bother with anything else yet) and add one component at a time and get it working before moving to the next.

I will say that having a decent knowledge of reverse proxies, networking, DNS and certificates will help you greatly. Having a solid understanding of Docker (if you’re using Docker) would be of great benefit too.

It should be much easier today than it was five/six-odd years ago when I started; things are more polished now than they were then.

They’re just hosting existing FOSS alternatives.

I’m running GrapheneOS and have no idea what things look like on the fruity phones.

I do this. I self-host rather than use Beeper but the effect is the same. Single client (Element) to my own Matrix server (Synapse) with bridges to WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram and Slack.

https://localsend.org/

Self-hosted, yes.

I use Matrix with bridges to Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram and Slack.

That means a single app that I can communicate on multiple platforms with.

My main conversations happen natively on Matrix but can also talk to “normies” on any of the others.

I use Rethink because I can have a “local firewall” and a WireGuard tunnel at the same time.

That’s the problem. WhatsApp will use GCM for push notifications. No GSF, no GCM.

You don’t need to sign in and it’s not needed for their location services. It works without it. It complains but still works.

GrapheneOS supplies a sandboxed version of those libraries and the underlying location requests don’t go to Google.

You sure can.

Luckily I signed up with fake details (name, address, etc.).

This implies they’re storing the plaintext password.

Ideally the password would be hashed with a salt and then stored. Then it’s a fixed length field and it shouldn’t matter how long the password is.

That’s how they “win”; by making it “not worth the effort”.

From the context, children.

Running GrapheneOS.

Just use rclone. It does this natively.

With Pihole you can restrict or be permissive with different devices, based on MAC or IP address.

I had the same issue but it’s working again for me now.

Self-recharging? The world needs more of this mysterious technology.

It’s the one they’re replying to.

Ahhh. Props to you, kind stranger.

Y…yes?

Yes. It prevents replay attacks.

That’s why I buy secondhand Pixels. You can normally get near-new quality if someone orders one as a gift and it’s the wrong colour, or they accidentally chose the wrong storage size, or something similar.

That way Google’s not getting my money.

“The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia.” ~ Malcolm Turnbul, former Australian PM.

Making it illegal only hampers those that follow the law.

Criminals, by definition, already don’t follow the law.

You Know How To Scare Me Shitless

twiiit.com will redirect you to a random Nitter instance. Sometimes the instance is blocked, sometimes the random instance works.

It’s slowly getting worse, as is Twitter X in general, but that’s X for you.

Each message in the various rooms are encrypted individually with their own keys. These keys are derived from the session keys of the participants in each of the rooms. That’s a lot of keys.

If you wish to read these encrypted messages across multiple devices you’ll need to have the same keys on each of those devices ("sessions ") too.

One method to share the keys is for your sessions to “gossip” them between each other.

When you logout of a session, all its keys are deleted.

If you ever logged out of all your sessions at once, you’d lose access to all those keys and you’d never be able to decrypt your old messages again.

To mitigate that, you can create a key backup that is itself encrypted and stored on the server (Secure Backup). This allows you to download the stored keys from the server, restore them to your current device and rejoin the discussions again.

The Cross Signing process is the process used to authorise your new session and allows it to participate in the key-gossip function. By restoring the keys from the Secure Backup you’re implicitly signing-in your device and blessing it all at once.

(… as far as I understand it all. Someone with more in-depth knowledge will correct me, I’m sure)

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/honda/

Sonos. Ikea also do a cheaper version with the same internals as the Sonos systems.

There are already guides written by the authors of the bridges.

Yep. That’s what this scenario solves.

Beeper is indeed Matrix with a WA bridge.

I have a WA client app running in an Android Emulator that runs for 10 minutes once a week.

It’s only needed because WhatsApp wants you to use an official client, otherwise they invalidate any attached sessions.

It’s not needed for any actual technical reason.