I don’t have a direct source other than the source code of the software they use: https://github.com/mautrix/signal

When using one of their “cloud hosted” bridges, the bridge software (that connects between Matrix/Beeper and other protocols) has to read all message content. Otherwise, it’s impossible to bridge to another protocol. E2EE becomes end (other users) to bridge (beeper) encryption.

With “local hosted” bridges, E2EE stays intact, but messages can’t be sent/received if the device hosting the bridge is unavailable.

In the future, with MLS (a different E2EE protocol), it could be possible to keep E2EE even when bridging to Matrix on cloud hosted bridges.

You want a magic Discord speedboost? It’s called OpenAsar. Mitigates telemetry, and speeds the client up to usable levels, especially on lower end hardware.

Not just the “lack of APKs”, but the lack of a FOSS build. As you noted, it is possible to instal an AAB by extracting the APK(s) inside, but that doesn’t magically remove non-foss libraries.

The only build is an aab file. This is a Play Store bundle file, not an APK, so not directly installable in Android without the Google Play Store.

The only build being a Google Play release also indicates that non-foss libraries were likely included, such as the FCM libraries, as is common for GPlay releases of otherwise FOSS projects.

As far as I’m concerned, Element X for Android is not available yet, unless either building from source (with modifications to included libraries), or by using a non-FOSS version from GPlay.

Your iPhone 13 syncs slower over USB because Apple decided to stay on Lightning connectors, which use USB 2.0 on the other end. Although FireWire was faster back when it co-existed with USB, the USB standard has surpassed it a long time ago with more power, faster speeds, and better physical connectors.

“Android” phones can sometimes have “close to mainline” Linux distributions flashed onto them. You can get some of those, used, for less than 100$.

A custom Android rom would provide you with a decent chunk of the freedom you want in a mobile device.

A phone specifically built for Linux, with as much as possible FLOSS firmware, will cost a lot more. The cheapest is probably the PinePhone.

VRChat in particular has been degrading in quality and experience ever since they needed to start pleasing investors. You can give it a try if you want, but there’s a lot of toxicity there. Platforms like ChilloutVR or NeosVR have a better (but smaller) community.

Although some titles like BONELAB or Pavlov do feel a lot more like “tech demos”, they are still great titles. Some desktop titles also have VR ports that are worth playing, No Mans Sky and The Talos Principle come to mind.

The modding scenes of a lot of games have good VR mods too, “Vivecraft”, if you’re into Minecraft. Subnautica has a good VR mod, Half-Life 2, Deep Rock Galactic, Outer Wilds, and much more.

Not when “Intel based Macs” go out of support. There is no way to run the M1/2 MacOS version without having Apple hardware.

Lets take the imaginary program Y. It is free open source software with the GPLv3 license. If Valve wants to include Y in SteamOS, they are free to do so. Any time Valve makes changes or fixes to Y, they are legally required to provide the source code of their changes, as stated in the GPL license included with Y.

A lot of programs have this license (or a similar one), which forces corporations to contribute back to FOSS projects.

Some Valve-made components in SteamOS are truly “SteamOS only”, but a good amount of fixes to non-Valve programs are submitted “upstream” (to the original project). Due to the nature of Linux, it might be possible to copy the few non-foss components in SteamOS and directly use them in another distro.

Alongside forced contributions due to licensing, Valve contributes a lot of code to “gaming” programs on Linux, such as Wine or DXVK. They also make some SteamOS components FOSS, including Gamescope for example. Valve is (currently) doing a lot of work “for the community” rather than for direct profit.

Mainly their creation of Proton, and contributions to DXVK and WINE have helped Linux gaming become possible on any distro.

It is up to the device manufacturer. Google develops Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and the Google apps and services (Google Play Store for example). This feature (afaik) is in AOSP.

Google developed the version in AOSP, which is open source. Device manufacturers are then able to change the code as needed. If a device manufacturer uses base AOSP with (nearly) no changes, the fix Google made will be applied when the AOSP update goes through the manufacturers build pipeline and to the device (on Google Pixel phones for example). For manufacturers that have a lot of changes compared to AOSP (Xiaomi, Samsung, and many more), they might have to create their own fix that works on their own version of Android, which takes a lot longer.

One of the reasons people run “Custom ROMs” on their Android phone is to be responsible themselves for updates and fixes instead of the device manufacturer.

The websocket API is being deprecated in 0.18.0 (next major release)

The same “rumors” exist about Matrix. According to some, “a lot of metadata is unencrypted”. While somewhat true, there’s literally no way to be able to deliver a message from person A to person B without knowing who the message is from and who it’s going to, especially on a decentralized platform. Most of the (not E2EE) metadata sent with an event in Matrix needs to be read by the homeserver, and thus can’t be E2EE.

Didn’t NVidia drop support for gamestream? To use that protocol with maintained software, iirc you need “Moonlight” on the device acting as your screen/controller, and “Sunshine” on your gaming pc.

Most of these projects are FOSS, so you have two options. Either ask the devs for OpenBSD support (but try installing everything on OpenBSD to see what goes wrong). Or try modifying the program yourself to add OpenBSD support.

Developers of these projects often target Linux, since it is by far the most used server kernel/OS. *BSD is not nearly as common.

The only way to potentially change that industry wide is to have enough people stubbornly use *BSD and help implement *BSD support for Linux specific tools they use.

Official support is often only provided with a docker setup as it standardizes bundled libraries and other needed blobs. This makes it easier to support many Linux distros.

Same here. Tried Mastodon, but the birdsite like way of following people, not topics, and having only this sites equivalent of “Sort by New”, just doesn’t work for me.

Deleted account history like many others (after a GPDR and manual export of everything). Going to delete my account just before the 30th, as I won’t be able to use it anyway. For now I’m still somewhat lurking on Reddit, so to keep my list of subscribed subreddits, I have not deleted my account yet.

I’ve heard similar things several times, so I’ve been staying away. I should move more of my daily tasks to different self-hosted or non-corporate services.

SearX-NG, coming off DuckDuckGo it wasn’t a major change in the internal structure (the search gets relayed over to a larger search engine), but there’s no one company behind it like DDG. They’ve been working together with Microsoft on some rather sketchy things.

I would still love to self-host something decent (that doesn’t relay over to a company), but nothing like that exists as far as I know.

Like everything that gets advertisements, ad-blockers will be built. While technically possible, look at the quality of SponsorBlock for YouTube. Serving ads in the API will clutter up feeds, data gathered by automatic programs or moderation tools, and it’s impossible to tell (on the Reddit server side) if they have actually been viewed.

Discord’s been going very downhill for years, and recently made a wider known awful change (although not too impactful). Wonder when they will be going too far with things like “Mee6” and “Nitro”.