derin's comments

You should use your bridge off of a residential IP in the same city as your other devices, or else Facebook finds the activity suspicious.

It does. I use ntfy with a ntfy server on one of my VPSs, and I use the official ntfy account on GMS as an intermediary.

It works fine, but I'll probably switch back to Matrix's push server at some point.

Edit: With Synapse + Element, obviously.

Gitlab and Element's website structure is different. element.io is the site for the managed product, so even their "on-premise" installer is meant to be used in a commercial relationship. For install docs you'd probably have to purchase their product (which isn't available freely).

You probably want to read the open-source software's installation instructions at: https://github.com/vector-im/element-web

TLDR, check out the project, run `yarn install`, then edit the config file, then `yarn build`.

And, yes, that is all there is to it. It's significantly simpler to deploy than GitLab.

Finally, you keep mentioning self-hosting; you _can_ just use a non-self hosted application like the downloadable version of Element, SchildiChat, Fluffychat, or any other client.

No reason to bring hosting into the mix for the client, if that's causing concern.

Unless they installed conda on an Apple machine, because I'm pretty sure that constitutes original sin.

...and where do you go when AWS/Signal's servers go down?

How about choosing something that's federated? https://matrix.org/

This is NPR One, no? That's why I've been using it - it gives you a nice steady stream of NPR's programming and outside podcasts, randomly sampled at first, which in time starts preferring your favored content (which it learns by you "liking" content).

https://one.npr.org/

Been listening to it for years, it's great stuff!

...because it's a different protocol with different needs that are satisfied by its own notation?

Edit: Just read Arathorn's comment above, very cool - I hadn't seen that one before.

Guess I was just skipped, then. C'est la vie - still a great project, and one worth sponsoring if you can (IMO).

I was on their Patreon for a while, but had to hop off because of financial fun.

Sadly none of the rewards are updated and the flair is no longer given out; at this point it makes sense to just see it as a donation.

Matrix[1] is trying to solve that issue, I'd highly recommend looking into it. I actually pipe most of my various "chat" networks (including WhatsApp) into it via bridges[2].

As you said, we in Europe are kind of forced to have WA installed, but at least you don't have to use it as your primary client if you don't want to. You can even deploy it to an Android VM and go completely headless, if you feel the need.

[1] https://matrix.org/

[2] https://matrix.org/bridges/

An incognito browser would ignore all client-side cookies, so the Slack web client would not try to - say - resume a previous user's session or re-use any previously saved data.

Likewise, incognito mode will also ignore most cached web content, meaning all assets on the Slack web app will get loaded again from scratch. This "clean state" start could, theoretically, get around issues with old - potentially incorrect/outdated - assets being loaded, even though that really shouldn't happen under most circumstances.

Telegram? Signal? Viber? Matrix?

I feel like all of these apps (with special emphasis on Telegram and Signal) have almost the exact same UX and features of WhatsApp... beyond adoption numbers.

Surely one of these can take its place?

Shame, that "Essential Gem" looked pretty promising...

Just as a heads up, you should probably remove the

  yaourt xmake

section of the install section (the Arch Linux instructions).

Yaourt is no longer actively maintained and poses security risks. Just linking to the AUR package is usually enough.

It was pretty straight forward to install/set up? There are some requirements to be able to federate, namely having a domain and associated certs for encryption, but otherwise nothing stood out as overtly obtuse/difficult.

You have to either make a venv for a binary or just install a package, then reverse proxy 2 ports from your http daemon, and finally also hook things up to your Postgres database. After all that it's just a matter of configuring your homeserver's config (which is large, but you can easily get support via the community for any poorly documented options)

The documentation could definitely be improved, though.

Yeah, the overall UI is significantly cleaner. The team did a great job with this one. Can't wait for it to replace the old Riot completely.

> Isn't this also the case with Matrix that no implementations except the official ones support E2E encryption?

A general purpose project to provide all clients with E2E encryption is being developed (and is usable right now): https://github.com/matrix-org/pantalaimon

Right now it runs as a daemon on a user's local machine.

When you consider the costs associated with running, say, a proper VPN or cloud storage solution it doesn't seem unreasonable to offer a paid plan.

Supporting Firefox and getting some perks normally associated with other paid services sounds like a win-win to me.

Completely valid response.

Yes, correct. Ironsource is an advertisement/UA company that doesn't offer any "toolbar". What you're angry at (and rightly so) is the fact that their network was used to offer malware/adware. As per the first article you linked:

> IronSource is likely to blame third party "partners" for most or all of the defects we have listed, but our analysis indicates that IronSource is importantly responsible.

Also from the second link:

> That’s not to say that IronSource is necessarily aware that a publisher (pay-per-install) is redirecting visitors to sites that impersonate Google Chrome.

This is a clear failure on Ironsource's part to secure their network, but it isn't evidence of any malitious intent on their part.

> This is just a spam piece from the spam company ironsource.

It's their job to deliver ads. And ad mediation. And UA.

> They try to put their spam-bundleware-crapware-search-bar into everything.

They don't have a "spam-bundleware-crapware-search-bar". You're frustrated at specific advertisements on an advertisement network/the security of the network as a whole.

> And this is just another article trying to convince app developers to make yet another spam app with spam bundle-ware

s/yet another spam app with spam bundle-ware/a mobile application utilizing advertisements/

I'm not saying anything about the quality of Ironsource as a network, but lets not make them out to be the boogeyman. They are, at worst, inept.

I am serious, my dude.