@gamedeviancy I decided to change the way how I save my notes. More specifically: Markdown

I got accustomed to it on spezzit FWIW, even without knowing about it in the first place, but then it felt so natural. I even use it here on Friendica, despite it being mostly relied on BBCode.

Now, how do I enjoy it? There are certain apps that save your notes as Markdown files in any folder of your choosing. You can then sync that folder through a cloud storage provider or through Syncthing so you can have your notes available on any device. And that’s it. If I do not like an app (even on one device) I switch to another. My notes stay with me an I can read them even in a normal text editor.

I did not encrypt my notes, but since these are just regular files, I assume you can use something like VeraCrypt to add the folder containing the notes in there and move them that way.

@Monument this guy planes!

@wdx

@tesseract from a market perspective, it’s an okay trade to pay for having privacy, as you still use their services. I also donated this month to my instance because those servers don’t get their uptime from the Holly Spirit. But this should come with an audit to check if they are really respecting the user privacy of the paying customers. Or better, some regulatory to figure out if the market price for privacy is justified or is it too big, compared to the amount of data created in a given period of time by the user and sold to the advertisers.

Not to mention, they should overhaul their data collection practices so that you only have your data collected while using the service. That means getting away with practices such as shadow profiles or pixel tracking.

Or they should just use other methods to make money with their service altogether.

@throws_lemy

@Whooping_Seal Is it different in any way than, say, YaCy?

@pineapplelover guess this will just make them sign up to services that don’t share data to Google. 🤷

@throws_lemy

@smeg Me and my friends use it as a fallback for mildly urgent stuff. If anything is more urgent, then we call each other.

@Dark_Arc

@ReversalHatchery I was thinking about that. I previously worked for a company that did the exact same thing, if I recall correctly (this was years ago, so I’m not sure whether they still do it). But I wanted to see if anyone has any more knowledge about this thing than me. If that’s what happens, I guess I’ll be fine simply keeping these contacts on Google and saving anything on GeneralSync going forward (or any other such alternative service).

@sbv Thank you!

@lemann Thank you! Yea, many of my contact’s emails are probably on Yahoo instead, so it’s not that much of a biggie. I know nobody using Tuta or Proton or whatever. And probably they no longer care since most people use their emails only for logging in to websites that don’t support SSO with social networks/Google and just outright create a new email if they forget their password to that. But hey, less data for Google is still less data for Google.

@aguslr cool. Thank you for the tips!

@tesseract Yea, I was thinking about using aliases and alias providers as a middle-man to send&receive emails to&from providers that are known to be hard to tackle for people self-hosting their email. I understood from the article I linked that setting up an email server and maintaining it is a hassle itself, but I was wondering whether doing what I said above does make things easier for me or if it would be an extra burden.

@andrew_bidlaw You can simply see this data on any Friendica instance if you have an account. Just hover your mouse over the like/dislike numbers, and you can see who upvoted/downvoted shit. You can even receive notifications about this on your own posts, just as on Facebook.

To me, it was funny back in the day to see all tankies brigading to downvote me on any single post or comment I made, the moment I started showing my political stances 😆 (yes, even stuff posted before that had no political stuff in them, lol). But yea. To some people, this might be a drawback.

The good thing, however, is that neither Kbin nor Friendica show you a centralized place in your profile to see what did you downvote. You just have to search every post you can find to see this info.

@U2VuZCBudWRlcyA6KSAK There’s also Beeper for pretty much all the most popular services. Should be more private than using the 1st party Facebook apps.

@Albin9326 Out of those, I guess Signal. Telegram has however a larger userbase and more features afaik. However, I am on Telegram and I don’t think I will make the switch to Signal, rather I’ll go full time on XMPP with OMEMO and PGP. OMEMO is made after the Signal protocol, and PGP is so versatile. I wish I could use it for everything, sadly, none of my friends use it and I am having a hard time explaining how it works to others.

@SummerBreeze I am not on Matrix.org (despite the fact I don’t know whether I have completed any captcha or not).

But yea, on XMPP the gold standard is pretty much OMEMO these days. And the fact that both Google and Facebook adopted it at some point in time tells a lot about how mature the project is.

@Dislodge3233 privacy wise, Google Pay is more private, as it obfuscates your real card details so the seller doesn’t actually know them (it provides some fake ones, linked to your actual card).

On the Google side of things OTOH…

Are there any alternatives to Google Pay?

If there are, they are certainly not open source. I remember there was an issue raised on Catima’s GitHub asking for payment support. The dev said that if implemented, a solution like this would need to contain some proprietary/licensed stuff from Visa or Mastercard.