They can follow me and everyone else who downloaded my digital cert I posted lost control of.

Welcome to the club.

I’ve always bought used phones anyway. With eBay/kijiji/others you can request the seller to enable OEM unlocking so you know it can be done and you don’t even need to boot it into android before installing GrapeneOS.

My experience, not many people are willing to do that for you. YMMV.

Clearly you already know the difference /s

I have no idea, I just use and remember the one I linked above.

https://archive.ph/

I picked up an android phone off marketplace then resold it after I created the account. I don’t mind if they think I’m someone else, in fact, I’d almost prefer it.

So, I’m self hosting basically this. I have a matrix server that is publicly accessible but I’m the only user on it. I’m also self hosting a handful of bridges, signal being one of them. I’ve played with the WhatsApp bridge, and I’m using an SMS/MMS bridge.

It’s basically a man in the middle for all your chat apps. The Signal bridge software will login to your signal account and have full access to everything. The bridge works by watching all the decrypted messages and posting them to a matrix room. The matrix room may or may not be encrypted. This means you need to put a lot of faith into the bridge code and the people hosting the matrix server. The SMS/MMS bridge I use doesn’t even support encrypted matrix rooms.

I personally would never use beeper. Even if I couldn’t selfhost, I would not trust one person/company with centralized access to all my messages. I’m sure they have good intentions and would never do anything to abuse their position but I won’t put anyone there.

I’m able to use an old android phone, without a sim, to avoid the SMS requirements.

I’m the only one in my friend group who likes to try new messaging apps. The best I’ve done is bridge everything into matrix and try and get them on there… None of them have moved.

Basically this. I’d just buy a used disk, swap them out and install Linux. That or use a USB.

When it comes time to return it, put the old hard drive in it and return it. I can’t think of a way for them to tell you did this aside from the lack of logs they keep from trying to track you.

Yeah, app cache had to be cleared. We good

I hate this so much. Its super cool but MAN what the hell. I don’t think I’m going to ever turn off my VPN anymore. I’m in a super small town and that image is correct.

It’s cached somewhere because I can’t get it to update. Maybe time for a new account too. Hmmmm