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

  • 5 Posts
  • 43 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • 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.



  • Ideally “users” wouldn’t only be IT guys but also an average person. Some of my friends use Matrix to message me. They certainly are no developers or have technical IT knowledge. They certainly don’t know how to set up a bot. With discord you just add a bot to your server (equivalent to a Matrix Space) and there you go. That’s user friendly. Matrix bots work yes. But they are by far not user friendly.




  • I love Immich and Sharkey but both use Discord. Sharkey even used Matrix in the beginning but eventually switched to Discord. I think their reasoning was that they were often attacked by trolls etc. and that Matrix didn’t had good options for moderation etc.

    And while I love Matrix I fully agree. Yes there are moderation bots like Draupnir and they’re good but you will need to self host them and register a user for them and and and. It’s not as easy as with Discord or even Telegram bots. Also there are many Discord bots providing very fun elements like levels, reputations, roles etc. which simply do not exist or aren’t even possible in Matrix as it currently is.

    On top of that we have the decentralization “problem” for end users who aren’t technical. They simply don’t care much about privacy and they don’t care if Discord stores every single message and picture in clear text forever on their servers. It’s easier to create a Discord account on a centralized platform than understanding Matrix understanding which server to choose, understanding which client to choose and understanding how encryption, key management etc. works. Yes decentralization is important and great but for the average user it’s still something that they do not really know which “overcomplicates” it for them.

    And another point is that Matrix spaces are simply not the same as Discord servers. Channels are not as easy to manage because they are rooms on their own in Matrix and a space is not a server but rather a way to organize multiple rooms. Not every client supports spaces yet. Clients implement them differently. Then there’s Element and Element X on phones confusing people new to Matrix etc. In Discord several channels can be grouped in another category. In Matrix you’d use Subspaces for that giving you the same issue as with normal spaces.

    And most clients don’t implement simple things on mobile like…sending multiple images at once. From the perspective of an end user that fact annoys the heck out of anyone wanting to send several pictures.

    So yeah I think it’s a mixture out of those things.

    Matrix especially needs better bot support with bots that could be used by everyone as it is with Discord instead of being only usable by server admins or the bots creators as it is with many Matrix bots. And it does need a better solution for spaces with rooms or another thing in the specs that replicates how Discord servers work so that it’s a “space” with actual “subchannels” without every space technically being it’s own room dangling around in limbo and just being “sorted” into the space.

    And it needs better moderation tools.







  • 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.



  • Take something like GrapheneOS if security is important for you:

    1. No bloatware
    2. 7 years of updates on the new pixel phones with it
    3. Much more secure than an iPhone
    4. An iPhone isn’t really privacy respecting or similar even though Apple always claims it to be
    5. An iPhone locks you in. Heck you can’t even let Nextcloud or Immich sync files in the background on iOS just because Apple says “no background sync only works good with our own services so you give us your money and use iCloud Photos and Drive”.








  • The files app has built in ads to push OneDrive to the users. And yes it can be declared as advertising because you can’t remove that ad and because MS pays Samsung for it (or gives Samsung benefits for it inside Windows on Samsungs computers).

    Besides that there are the same kind of ads in the settings app.

    And there’s also many components of the OS that push the user into paying money like for fonts or for Always on Displays or lockscreens or whatever else. Those are not direct ads but you could declare them as auch because of the fact that a user gets pushed into micro payments for basic customization of their phone which for me personally is a no go, especially if you pay money for a flagship phone.