Why drugs? VPSes, domains and gift cards are the legal things I can think of. Monero has been massively helpful to me with those while I cannot use my card)

I did not buy any, but got one as a gift. Was embarrassed to use it in public, but genuinely enjoyed. All because since earlier than I can remember, I require keeping my hands busy with something.

Monero seems to be the closest successor to the idea, actually. It is accepted in a lot of places, and I got actual use out of it when I couldn’t use my card.

Weird, conduit.rs links an entirely different Gitlab page - https://gitlab.com/famedly/conduit, with the docs being at https://docs.conduit.rs/deploying/docker.html

I prefer Conduit instead of Synapse - it is lighter on resources.

I meant telemetry to Google and/or manufacturer. With grandma, I can at least install Linux on her laptop and say to message me there (that’s pretty much what I did with mom).

Yea, but a typical cellphone is not as easy to make private as a typical laptop or desktop. Lineage has some tradeoffs and not accessible on all devices, and Graphene needs even more specific, quite expensive hardware!

Did you have trouble setting up XFTP one? SMP was fine but XFTP seemed to have some error in the systemd settings provided in the manual.

I am suspicious of it because you pretty much cannot host a node. Well, you can - but you’d have to deposit an INSANE amount of money (like $2k or something). While Simplex, even though I do have a concern with its initial centralization by the power of default, is decidedly easy to selfhost.

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Signal is annoying to use if you don’t have a smartphone you can trust, since they do not allow registration from desktop. So either an Android VM or Signal-cli. But maybe it was just a one-off bug that the desktop client didn’t bind to signal-cli for me. Still, the fact that you need an unofficial command-line application just to register makes it not exactly user-friendly.

To be fair, pretty much all major XMPP clients have adopted OMEMO encryption, so doesn’t seem like much of an issue.

Effectively not encrypted, requires a smartphone, can be anal about bans, etc.

I don’t like physical copies. For convenience, I would be ripping it anyway, and then what? CDs and DVDs take up way too much space, then I would have to eiher throw a perfectly working disk away (which just feels bad) or bother selling it (which is not even guaranteed). I understand it if you’re into the collecting aspect, but I am personally not. If I was really set on paying for the media, I would rather go for a DRMless purchase. Or if it is not available, do it like with my Steam games - buy a DRMed copy and then pirate a DRMless one corresponding to it.

What settings presented most trouble to you, just curious?

Google and MS are the entities you’d definitely want to keep your data away from, no thanks. And Proton doesn’t work with normal mail clients, which is kind of a dealbreaker. I remember seeing a comparison chart somewhere with an assortment of other services.

What “someone else’s service” would you recommend?

I am hosting both XMPP and Matrix now, and my main concern with Matrix is storage. I am afraid it would eat up the very limited disk space I have on my VPS. Conduit offers no built-in way to clean files up, and media is stored in a weird way that makes it a PITA to see which ones can and cannot be deleted. I now know that neither the database files nor the media can be just deleted.

I sorta like the idea of a chatroom existing on more than one server, but that MUST have been opt-in or at the very least opt-out.

I use full-disk encryption on my Debian, and I honestly don’t see what’s wrong with entering your passphrase on boot.

Not just bot-farms and spammers, but just a regular person. What is Signal’s main feature? Encryption. You would not want to expose your sensitive chats to a smartphone, unless it has a privacy-respecting OS (which not all phones can do). Good thing I only have to use it with a couple of guys who don’t want to use other encrypted communication methods.