I have been thinking about it for quite a long time, my dream is a linux e ink minimal smartphone, i think it would be the right mix between convenience, freedom and minimalism

I feel like this will put them much more under the authorities target, music is much more sensible than books, simply because it moves more money…

Anyway I still am wondering how they managed to do this and how they still didn’t get caught, there must be reeeally good devs there.

I couldn’t make it work whatever I did, whichever instance I used it seemed to get rate limited after a while or showing weird results…

Def good for a PC, def not good for an e reader

I guess getting a flip phone and stick to an eBook reader would be a good solution

thanks for this, so it’s not that bad and it seems to be working fairly good enough… Mmmh I might think about that, how’s the battery life? How long do the tips last? The pen is active or passive?

I also looked into supernote, it’s expansive, but it’s totally worth the money if they can offer a full Linux support with an e ink device, and it’s better than the pinenote because of the repairable hardware and the pen which doesn’t need tips replacements.

But they have kinda pulled back on the Linux development, it looks like it was more marketing than other, they have been promising it for a while but they’ve stated it’s harder than they thought.

I won’t buy an Android device so I’ll wait until a real Linux support is added.

At least if you just do phone calls the attack surface is reduced… They can scan your calls maybe, but not your entire chat history with all of your contacts and give it to an AI which could profile you based on that + you are not scanned on everything else you do on your phone / locked into proprietary ecosystems.

The ideal would just be using a Linux platform and using something like xmpp, but who are you gonna convince to use it? People use what they are used to use, if it’s not popular messaging apps is phone calls… And now it seems a more private alternative…

I think the second batch is already out, called “community edition”

OK I’m getting a flip phone

Xmpp, IRC, Matrix, all great decentralized alternatives, but good luck convincing people in contacting you on Xmpp…

This problem is a problem because it’s a social tendency, not because we don’t have alternatives… Very sadly…

The AI thing is very cool, I think something like that exists, agentic browsers.

But I am scared this would be just the next abstraction, of this chains of abstractions… Corporations are already using AI to profile you even further, the internet will definitely adapt under this pressure, and I believe that in a few years agentic browsers will just become the new norm.

Search engine at first were more objective, now people have learnt to play the game of SEO to attract views, search engines have started to show targeted results, and stuff like Searx came out, or Yaci, claiming to get back a more objective web. There always have been ways to filter out or to try being more objective, but I think the evidence have shown that as a social momentum, this stuff doesn’t work.

Yeah Yaci (self hosted crawler) is a great project, but it’s stagnant, and the prevalence is still a shitty google or bing searche engine, and this is true for other aspects of the web.

Social media? There were more independent social medias while centralized stuff was rampant, now there’s the fediverse and decentralization. Which is super super beautiful, but most people are just unaware. The social momentum is not saying that we are going towards a world where every little server will be connected to other little servers and decide in which parts integrate one another, that would be great, and I’d love to see that, but it’s simply not where we are currently going as a society.

Now it’s the turn of AI, it can be a helpful tool for a while to avoid it all, stuff like agentic browsers can give us some freedom for a while when they will be actually usable and reliable, but in that time the web will have evolved again and pheraps we’ll need to take into account new ways to defend ourselves or to look through the bushes.

It’s a never ending hide and seek unless something really big changes. Linux, free software, open source is all great, but we are continuously pushed towarbalance mainstream in some way or another. And most people live the mainstream, not in the alternative, despite the alternative being objectively better. It is just unsupported by our culture.

It’s an abstraction built on another abstraction built on another abstraction… And the web is just the most clear example of that, I mean the very languages in which the web is built are an example itself: JS (which already is high level)>React>Next. You see? Abstraction on abstraction.

But when will we stop to play games and just stay in the present? Focusing on the core of things?

Do we strive to get to a sort of technological ecstatic point in which all will actually be clear? A sort of technological philosopher stone? And the way to do that is through collection of loads and loads of human data?

My perspective on this is quite pessimistic, because it’s a form of cruel optimism to say that one can solve this problem individually. To change this would require a coordination of consumers, programmers and people revolving around all things of the internet to fix it, unless we assume that AI is somehow sentient and can be better at solving our problems than we do, which I do not exclude: faster and better at looking and processing novelty than we are.

But that will mean that us, as humans, will just be obsolete.

I always come to the conclusion that the web maybe it’s not worth getting used as it is right now, and maybe to feel good we should stop trying to relate to machines and instead just living our own biological needs… Focusing on beings which we can understand better… Living in the present… And stop running, whether it means running away, or towards. Rejecting culture and just staying in our own spaces, cultivating simplicity and balance.

Sorry for the philosophycal rant lmao, I guess this was just more than a technical problem for me lmao, but thanks for your answer!

Mh I get this, yes you pay more on outsourcing but usually you also get a service and an easier time, I would like to understand how much does it actually change…

Surely I’d have to understand how much it’s economically worth it. On super basic plans I remember even seeing something like “40€ for 1 year website CMS hosting” (on the cheaper side). Which is the cost of a basic VPS on which you can probably run 100 sites on low traffic… And charge each client 80€ for hosting + maintainance, it’s an easy great gain you’re getting per site. And maybe add something if they want also email. Great passive income in this case.

But on bigger plans tailored to devs more than to direct clients does it keep being worth it? How much would I spend to host 100 WordPress websites + email on something like Hostinger VS self hosting them all on my VPS?

I guess it also depends on your experience with self hosting, at first I was messing up when doing it, now I understood that most apps really just need mostly the same stuff, and it’s mostly all easy set and go. Unless I get hacked or get above some of my VPS limits I don’t see big issues coming if I’m hosting 4/5 services for my clients.

I already self host some stuff on my own and rarely have to touch it unless I wanna add features or something like that. I guess with more clients you’ll have to factor in scalability and/or managing multiple servers: all great stuff to learn but also yeah def more complex than doing a login and have a nice dashboard with all the services there ready for you…

That’s super cool! Honestly would be really good to find work gear, but also everyday gear, since 99% of pants I wear are cargo pants lmao!

Thanks!

That’s actually a good tip, the weird thing so far I’ve noticed are the incredibly low prices, like too low to be true, is this just because this is a type of merch which lots of people don’t buy, or because there are lots of fakes?

Use a reverse proxy to proxy everything through https, then you can install how many services you want. Caddy is super simple, you can reverse proxy with just 1 line.

For calendar and contacts (caldav, cardav) Baikal is extremely easy to install and use. And pretty minimal.

Slowly switch to Linux devices, or dumb phone, and learning to adapt happily living without some features, but also without control and censorship :)

As far as I knew reverse proxies could only reverse proxy stuff coming in from 443 or 80, I didn’t know they could listen other ports as well!

Main reason why I was using a reverse proxy at first is because I had everything behind cloudflare, and cloudflare can only proxy and give you an SSL encryption for stuff that goes through 443, so I could make Caddy listen to 443 and then forward to interested ports.

But this leaves out everything that needs to go in some other places than 443, and requires its own standalone ssl certificate, which is a bit cumbersome. Pheraps these can be proxied with other proxies than cloudflare, hopefully giving SSL to everything…

I’m not sure I understood the upstream ssh thing, what do you actually do?

Honestly, with Fdroid and many other open source projects at risk after Google’s last madness, I wouldn’t take anything Android anymore (nor Apple of course).

My next phone will either be a dumbphone or a Linux phone.

Self hosting IS hard, don’t beat yourself too much because of it… After all you’re trying to serve services for yourself that are usually served by companies with thousands of employees.

A server requires knowledge, maintainance and time, it’s okay to feel frustrated sometimes.