That’s why here, giving a student a laptop without supervision is unthinkable… Good if the school has computers at all anyway.

Correction. Briar is true p2p, while Simplex relies on servers - but said servers can be hosted by anyone and interoperate.

Not even that. Go set it up even with a phone number but without a smartphone.

Let’s just say my mom would not be able to do that.

And effectively cannot be selfhosted.

The problem is actually further - it’s that they push people to use Signal on mobile.

In the official desktop client, there is no option to register (even though it would likely be not that hard to add a box accepting a verification code), they tell you to use it in the mobile app instead. All while far from all phones can have privacy-respecting OSes installed on them at all.

Yes, there are ways around (Signal-cli or an Android VM - and even then you have to use Molly since the official client requires you to scan a QR rather than following a link). But arbitrarily directing people to a platform that is harder to make private is nonetheless weird.

Or just a gray sim registered to a rando, at least here they’re still illegally sold. The ones on silent link are e-sims, afaik you’d have to enable google services to manage it.

Seems like there is nuance though.

Yea, IIRC XRay is the most advanced solution for that now.

There is also sshuttle if you want to route everything through SSH, but not tried personally.

it’s just a way to reward volunteers

Yea, but creating a node requires a BIG initial stake. So wonder how likely it is that you’d at least break even with this.

My issue is effective impossibility to selfhost. XMPP, Simplex, even Matrix are very possible to run on your own, while a Session node would be insanely, arbitrarily expensive (requires around $1000 now, IIRC used to be more). A hobbyist like me and you would not want to pour this much into something they provide out of the goodness of their heart.

Seriously, if you have this much disposable money, you’d be better off running a few Tor nodes in various places).

Well, there are enough public XMPP or even Matrix servers, so doesn’t seem THAT unlikely…

Huh, and for me Searx hasn’t been great for searching in Russian in particular.

The only acceptable use I have seen for myself are trading sites you log in through Steam - since their sole purpose is interacting with your Steam inventory.

Ah, thanks! I don’t use passkeys myself yet, and I guess would be waiting longer - really don’t want Play Services in any form)

Mostly wondering for KeepassXC, as the managers you mentioned are cloud.

Have not tried passkeys on mobile, so wonder how it is on Graphene and other degoogled OSes…

To be fair, there is a “something you know” factor - the passphrase for the database containing the passkeys. But I kinda do wish they were more easily password-protected individually, like how you do with SSH keys. You can have a separate database for each passkey I guess… But yea, inconvenient.

The big ones are out of the question for me because they usually don’t accept crypto that freely (plus KYC). Like, one of them, don’t remember which, accepted Bitcoin (which is bad on its own, BTC’s fees are bad for small transactions) - but only if you have a working card first! And I use crypto BECAUSE my card is not functional there!!

Ah, nice to know. I personally consider this a fair tradeoff for freedom and lack of financial surveillance.

Is using cash impossible in daily life instead? It is hard to imagine for me that a smartphone may be outright required for daily life…