Thank you so much 🙏, hope your journey goes smooth!

Don’t make assumptions about people based on a technical post. I did mention project maven in my reasons but didn’t want to derail the conversation into politics. I also did say the list of reasons goes on.

Yes so I started first with it set to None which didn’t work then I created the kde script which fixed the issue. You can test this by opening vscode, clicking on a link and seeing that doesn’t focus Firefox. Apparently this is because some apps need to properly re-implement window focus code after the wayland security updates and push updates through. There have been complaints that discord has the same issue too. Wayland won’t do anything to fix it because they see it as a security fix for window stealing but I have no idea what kde is doing when it’s set to None.

This setting didnt do anything different for me when I set it to ‘None’ 🥲

The letter point I was trying to make is that most people trust the postal service not to read their letters. We know that the postal service doesnt gain revenue from reading peoples letters so they have no incentive to do so. If the government wants to read your letters, they can intercept them freely. This is the same analogy with Mailbox. I do get medical, dental, insurance emails sent to my inbox however all of those emails contain nothing other than “please visit this link” to view your medical information. If any company sent me any sensitive text by email, I wouldnt want anything to do with them.

Maybe a person is gay, but isn’t ready to share this with everyone, only a few people… Should that info be used to market “gay” products to them?

Are you suggesting that Mailbox.org are secretely reading through my emails and doing the marketing anyway? Or are you talking about Google?

You wouldn’t be OK with someone rifling through your physical mail

I like your analogy here, your comments have given me things to think about too. Questions (not being sarcastic so apologies if it comes across that way):

• Do you sent letters to family and friends like birthday cards in encrypted text? If not, how do you know the letters arent being read in transit too? Where do you draw the line in privacy without putting on a tin foil hat and living in a bunker?
• If the German government wants to get access to my emails and has to go through hoops to do so, couldnt they do the same thing for everything in my life like letters, insurance, voting, mortgage etc.

I guess what im trying to convey is: What is wrong with only going the extra mile for encryption for the things that you deem as truely private to you? If you decide to make everything in your life private, how difficult might your life get? I know that some people like journalists need to go down that road obviously but those are life requirements.

PS. I have edited the wording slightly in my post so it doesnt seem like i am pushing anyone in the direction of no encryption by default.

Thank you for the discussion btw, appreciate it!

If i were antifa CEO, i most certainly would be using that too instead of my listed choice 😄

Wow that’s epic man… What phone did you switch from and is there anything you miss?

Lol about pokemon go comment. You are being a legend though by updating places and helping others.

I feel that you’re right we need more people working together as long as we don’t end up with another closed source map competitor that we end up hating again 😅. I think distributed systems is the way forward. So I would love to see the reviews being kept separate from the map so that it doesn’t matter what map you use in the future, reviews are the same…

Thank you for the nice comment 🙏. I agree, it’s the reviews that pull me back in sometimes because I’m not a huge fan personally of trip advisor reviews. I will experiment with different apps mentioned here by others though and give myself challenges in some places not to use Google maps.

Ah good point I forgot about this, this might not work for some people, but i always tend to use my phone directly for navigation. This has been a habit so i dont feel like im missing out on auto.

“E2EE then you aren’t really gaining anything from having it on your end.” - That’s exactly right and most of my contacts dont use Proton/Tuta, they use Gmail (even though I rarely send an email to my contact anyway). You can though send an email to a non-mailbox user (gmail) and they get a link to the mailbox.org secure reader.

I respect your opinion and totally can see your point. Mailbox.org is based in Germany which has some of the strongest privacy rules in EU, there is a hell of alot of court hoops that would have to happen just for the government to get access to my data. They wouldnt do this lightly. They would not do this unless they have reason to believe I am doing something unlawful.

Personally I would argue that de-google and privacy are very closely-related but not entirely opposite. Many people are de-googling for various ranked reasons like not being a product themselves, not letting large corporations take over etc.

I agree that I would rather have my data belong to me fully (which is why i wouldnt rule out proton mail/tuta in the future) however I value privacy more in my Drive and Photos than i do in emails which is mainly for shopping etc. If the government wants to get a court order to check out the stupid shit I buy online like a Spork (Spoon and fork on each end), feel free to do so!

True to everything you mentioned about different regions👍, I would say that the aim here isnt to cripple myself, I would argue life is too short to go into extremes too but that my own personal opinion. If I de-googled 80-90% of their products but was left with the remaining 20%, I have already decreased the revenue they get from me by not using their other products…

Just FYI though, Digital Markets Act in the EU have been trying to push more regulations that mean that Google/Apple arent the only providers for digitial payments online. This is what I was talking about regarding Google monopolising. If regulations like that come through, hopefully it will trickle to the rest of the world too. Curve bank for example has direct access to the NFC “tap-to-pay” system. There is no reason why other banks cant just do the same thing! This way the bank bypasses Google Pay.

Sure thing, I will do a seperate detailed write up of the comparisons.

Small spoilers though for why I went with Filen: From what you mentioned based on your use, I would say Filen would work perfectly for that because of how great it mounts the drive on Linux/Windows (tested myself) and Mac (havent tested). I always open documents in OnlyOffice and Obsidian files (MD) locally too and then re-sync back to the cloud.

• Proton Drive: I could see myself moving to Proton at some point in the future because I love the idea of their Drive however… They really annoyed me by not completing a product before moving onto the next one. There is no Drive on linux, there is no network mount, the mobile apps like calendar have alot of bugs and dont work offline. I know that they say its all coming very soon but if you look at the threads on reddit, those discussions have been happening for years. For example, why build an average AI (Lumo) that no one asked for first before polishing your other products.

• Koofr: No network mount and just felt too basic to me.

• PCloud: Probably one of my FAVOURITE drives in terms of feature set (including Linux app) but there are so many people online complaining about their accounts being randomly closed. In addition to this, i find it VERY suspicious that they advertise themselves being based in Swizerland when they are actually based in Bulgaria. I also dont like the fact that they are pro-privacy but then use US datacentres sometimes. My instinct tingles here but I dont have enough evidence (yet).

• Mega: The pricing just wasnt right for me, why isnt there a 500GB option? Also, there are articles questioning Mega’s encryption not to mention their company history.

I will mention all the others in a seperate post too.

Good question, my subscriptions on YT range from music channels (I dont use Youtube music) to tech channels (gamers nexus). When I searched for the specific channels I was subscribed to on PeerTube, I didnt find any of them 🤷. Privacy guides and tech news bits from different sources were excellent though. I havent abandoned PeerTube yet though, I need to keep giving it more attempts. What has your experience been like if you fully switched over?

Exactly this, I was using RSS mainly and recently Mastodon for news subscriptions. My main reason of being on Facebook was old friend connections abroad and selling things on Marketplace. Finding another market place is easy. Regarding old friends - I just thought that if im not engaging with them often anyway, what am I really losing out on (curiosity does get the best of us sometimes). Either way, Facebook is 🗑️.

I will check out grayjay thanks for the mention!

I’m using only office but have a lot of love to libre office too.

I followed this tutorial (ironically on YouTube) to install lineage os which was very helpful because I had issues with Odin (new version didn’t pick up my phone) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CuHRh9k7rbk

I use sandboxing a lot too in Firefox, I have requested that mozilla try to prioritise containers for Firefox mobile though because I really miss it!

I compared the price of buying a solid mini pc (230£) to ente 200gb (60£ per year) and just went with ente for now however you definitely right once I exceed that 200gb limit. I could buy a cheaper mini pc, however I would want to run many more services once I get the self host bug 😬

I had subscribed to specific chosen channels like tech ones, I don’t rely on facebook to randomly spoon feed me ‘the sun’ articles… When I saw those, I just hid them forever. Either way, news has not been a problem for me as FB wasnt my main go to for that.

How have you found banking apps on your fair phone, anything that you miss?

My mailbox.org experience for 4 months now has been stellar. You can pay monthly to see if everything works out first and it’s only like 2-3 euro. I have absolutely stress tested every mail feature and everything has worked flawlessly. Contacts and calendar are now my main drivers too. They also had a video conferencing solution which I used a few times and it was surprisingly good too.