They can recieve security updates if you use an alternative ROM such as Lineage or /e/OS.

Can you please explain how e/OS/ is insecure?

I’ve heard a lot of people complain about software glitches and minor hardware issues. These issues may be due to the fact that the Pixel 6 was the first Pixel to use Google’s own Tensor chips.

Get a Pixel 7 or newer and put Graphene OS on it. Pixels are excellent phones and have good support for custom ROMs. The Pixel 6 has a lot of weird issues that the others don’t have, so avoid it. Graphene is the best ROM for privacy AND security, and it is also relatively user-friendly.

Or, if you want an older phone, try a Pixel 3, 4 or 5. They are good phones with an older design style that may appeal to you.

/e/OS (also known as Murena) is also a good ROM for privacy, and supports a broader range of devices.

Fedi client app developers need to design fedi client apps in a holistic way to include a custom server (as with Mammoth’s moth.social) or create an account for the user on one of a curated selection of other servers, without forcing the user to choose one.

It’s a severe problem with trying to grow fedi that general users are expected to understand how servers work and make an informed decision about which one to join. General users don’t care about this topic and will quickly turn away when it is forced upon them. That’s why the client app needs to handle this for the user without making a fuss about it.

These apps also need good discovery features and feeds with posts that are trending generally and for specific topics. Then devs need to make money with those apps somehow, then they need to market those apps (at this point, it goes beyond just “devs” and expands into an organization with a marketing department, etc.).

Then, hopefully fedi’s inherent advantages of interoperability and resilience will naturally cause people to choose these user-friendly, effectively marketed fedi client apps over things like Instagram, Tiktok, etc. After all, if it can’t compete on its own merits with all other factors being equal, there’s no point to it for most people.

It’s a hard user experience design problem to create an interface that presents all possible types of posts, content and interactions in a sensible way. This “kitchen sink” approach is kind of what Facebook does and as a result its interface is messy and cluttered. That’s not to say it’s impossible or wrong to do things that way, just difficult and unpopular.

On the technical side, it’s really hard to make a client app that works with multiple server softwares, because they all have different sets of features.

In the current world of fedi software development, it would be a single dev or a small, likely unpaid team that would have to make the equivalent of several different client apps combined into one. I don’t anticipate such a large and complicated project being completed until the devs can make a decent living doing the work.

Nextcloud may be a bit overkill for your use case, but it does have a very good video chat function. It’s also pretty easy to deploy as a snap package or with the AIO docker image. A downside is that the other person has to have an account on your instance and log into it to join a call. However this is not necessarily difficult to arrange.

I would very much prefer to use passkeys wherever possible. My password manager of choice Bitwarden also supports them. Unfortunately, Android 13 which I am running does not support setting a default app to handle passkeys. So I cannot access that functionality on my phone yet. I think in a few years I will be authenticating with passkeys for a lot of services. However there will be a lot of services that lag behind in terms of offering passkey authentication.

Learn Linux TV has some stickers related to FOSS and self-hosted sofware. It also helps support a great learning resource.

https://merch.learnlinux.tv/

Thank you, I wasn’t sure if that video was re: Traefik or VPN. I appreciate the suggestion.

How did you set up a VPN to securely connect to your services over the internet? I have looked for guides to do this and haven’t had much luck. I would really like to implement this in my setup.

I self host jellyfin, nextcloud, owncast, tandoor, komga, photoprism and searxng. I use nginx proxy manager for a reverse proxy and SSL cert automation. Works great for me but I would like to get into traefik sometime.

I self host for privacy reasons, also it’s fun, it’s a learning opportunity and sometimes self-hosted services are functionally better than the other options out there.

Jellyfin is ideal for privately sharing music. Plex is similar but not FOSS.

That’s funny, my phone is kinda small so I had to scroll that horizontal menu with the download button, over to the right to access that button 😆 Thanks for the screenshot

I also ran into that issue the other day. Did you file a feature request for that? If you didn’t I will. In general though I really like Moshidon. The video player functionality I want is not available in any mastodon client app except for Fedilab technically, but its implementation is still very primitive for now.

That’s awesome, nice work! I just tried out Tesseract and it seems to work quite well. Feel free to leave some links where people can try it or contribute to the project, if you like.

True. A lot of things could be improved with the design, this is really just to visualize the core concept. I was also thinking a play/pause button on the pinned player would be good.

Getting fancier, maybe double tap on the right of the pinned player to skip forward 15 seconds would be sweet for skipping ad spots, and when you go the original post, the video could be fixed to the top of the page while you scroll into the replies.

Agree, if you are running containers on a casual or “just for fun” basis then automatic updates are fine. But the more you or others depend on the service running, the more it makes sense to perform an update manually, when you have time to troubleshoot any problems that may arise. Or, even update on a test setup first to identify issues and then update on your production setup.

You know you can just request the desktop site on FB messenger and use it on your phone that way right?

https://www.makeuseof.com/how-to-view-desktop-version-of-any-site-on-mobile/

Traefik is powerful and versatile but has a steep learning curve. It also uses code to control its configuration which is a bonus for reliability and documentation as discussed elsewhere ITT. Nginx proxy manager is much simpler and easier to use, may be a good one to get started with, but lacks the advantages of traefik described above. Nginx proxy manager does support SSL cert automation.

Another suggestion for you, I highly recommend specifying a version for the docker image you are using for a container, in the compose file. For example, nextcloud:29.0.1. If you just use :latest, it will pull a new version whenever you redeploy which you may not have tested against your setup, and the version upgrade may even be irreversible, as in the case of nextcloud. This will give you a lot more control over your setup. Just don’t forget to update images at reasonable intervals.