Same. I’ve been tentatively exploring podcasts, since most of what I used YouTube for was listening to videos to get to sleep at night. It would be exciting if Peertube use picked up because of this, though.

Maybe, but I normally only leave battery optimization on for apps that shouldn’t be running in the background at all. This was several years ago, though. If Signal isn’t like that anymore, that’s a good thing.

SimpleX is what I use. I tried Signal in the past, but there was a noticeable delay in receiving messages and it caused problems when using it to communicate with family.

I have no problems with SimpleX so far. It works well and looks modern. A feature I like is that you can create a different user identity for each contact/ chat thread. It also supports socks5 proxy.

I believe Briar can’t do offline messaging without setting it up to use another app. That’s the main reason my friend group shifted to SimpleX instead of Briar.

Llamacpp, Koboldcpp, and TabbyAPI are also popular local backends for local AI. SillyTavern or RisuAi are good frontends for a chat/RP style experience. Or LM Studio for a simple, all in one solution.

Ubuntu Touch is still available for the Pinephone, as far as I know. I intended to get a Pinephone Pro next time I need a phone, but then I read about the Furi FLX1 and I have to say, it sounds pretty great. Although it doesn’t sound like any other distros will run on it besides what comes on it.

Once I get a Linux phone, I’ll be totally Google-free. That’ll be a sweet day.

Yep, that is what I did. It just seems ironic that a company that sells the service of protecting your privacy wants to violate your privacy in order to do it.

Most email clients I’ve used can work with either, but there’s no point in using both.

They require an amount of personal info that I don’t really want a company to have.