23, Sysadmin, Vegan
Fediverse: https://calckey.braydmedia.de/@brayd

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • The good thing here is that you don’t need to trust the server in order to have a secure communication since your clients decrypt and encrypt and not the server.

    Yes they can optimize with things like this but that doesn’t make it insecure. It’s still the most secure solution that the average person can use.

    Threema doesn’t even have the server open sourced at all, are for profit and their encryption has been compromised.

    Session is shady.

    Matrix is a metadata nightmare due to it’s federated aspects.

    SimpleX is the only thing that is secure, anonymous and good in this regards but it has some small details left that prevents people from switching. I.e. simple things like the fact that you can’t see an overview of your images and videos sent in a chat without scrolling up all those messages. It seems trivial but for the average user stuff like that is important since they know it and use it every day in other messengers.




  • SimpleX is great. BUT it’s not user friendly. Thus general adoption for the average user will be hard. Don’t get me wrong using the app itself is easy but as soon as someone switches their phone that doesn’t have technical knowledge they will loose their chats because they won’t understand the concept of moving their DB. Since you don’t have an identifier like a phone number with SimpleX those people could even lose contacts as a whole since they generate a new DB, hurting their social connections.

    That’s the reason I personally never recommend SimpleX to anyone who doesn’t have the technical knowledge to understand stuff like that.



  • Signal can’t see who is texting who. They can’t see which groups you are part of. Those information are end to end encrypted, same as your chats itself, your profile picture, your stories, etc.

    Signal doesn’t store message timestamps either.

    What Signal itself knows of you is your phone number, the timestamp of your registration, the timestamp of your last connection to the server. That’s it.

    Yes metadata is critical but Signal handles metadata very well. Indeed, even though I’m a fan of Matrix, better than Matrix. Matrix is a metadata nightmare due to it’s centralized structure and the way the protocol works.



  • Yes, I have tested Logseq and even donate to them monthly. However I don’t use it actively. Reason is that I just can’t figure out a way to store my quotes and my opinion about them from books the same way I do it in Notion.

    Basically I store my quotes like this:

    Inside each quote I write my opinion or the summary of the quote in my own words, etc.

    And then for the books I have it like this:

    And inside each book I have the quotes linked:

    So yeah I haven’t found any way in Obsidian or Logseq to replicate this structure. It’s always something simliar that’s not working the same way and feels off and only with tweaks, custom CSS and stuff like that.


  • Fully agree. That’s also the main reason I am using Notion even though it’s not FOSS, not encrypted etc.

    I was fine using Obsidian (even though it’s not FOSS either, but you own your data) but I can’t figure out a good way to track books and quotes plus my opinion about them while querying them the same way it works in the database with Notion. Dataview is great for many things but doesn’t have pagination etc.


  • For me Nextcloud AIO works. Still I don’t like how “unstable” NC is. There’s always something that does not work in any setup. Wish it was more stable or there would be a better alternative. For me it’s videos. But only those that are MP4 and have their moov atom at the end of the file. They can’t be played.

    https://github.com/pulsejet/memories/issues/984

    It’s a headache. Set up Ente Photos just for that. Good side effect is that the images from my family and myself are stored E2EE encrypted on the self hosted Ente Photos instance.




  • Yes I know about AppFlowy and also about Anytype. However AppFlowy feels off for some reason and not as stable. Anytype feels pretty good but it has the issue that you can’t store and sync more than I think 1 GB of data. You could self host a sync server but that’s extra complicated with that software for some reason. So it’s not really a good alternative either. :/






  • I had everything behind my LAN, but published things like Nextcloud to the outside after finally figuring out how to do that even without a public IPv4 (being behind DS-Lite by my provider).

    I knew about Cloudflare Tunnels but I didn’t want to route my stuff through their service. And using Immich through their tunnel would be very slow.

    I finally figured out how to publish my stuff using an external VPS that’s doing several things:

    • being a OpenVPN server
    • being a cert server for OpenVPN certs
    • being a reverse proxy using nginx with certbot

    Then my servers at home just connect to the VPS as VPN clients so there’s a direct tunnel between the VPS and the home servers.

    Now when I have an app running on 8080 on my home server, I can set up nginx so that the domain points to the VPS public IPv4 and IPv6 and that one routes the traffic through the VPN tunnel to the home server and it’s port using the IPv4 of the VPN tunnel. The clients are configured to have a static IPv4 inside the VPN tunnel when connecting to the VPN server.

    Took me several years to figure out but resolved all my issues.