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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 22nd, 2025

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    • If you have a targeted group/peer need then whatever they are using or whatever you all decide right in the beginning - I’d suggest Matrix or some other decentralised alternative, definitely not Signal.
      • Matrix had the huge opportunity to be “the messaging app” but they neither became good at corporate usage and definitely ended up sucking at personal usage. They started doing too many things, at once, and while completely ignoring the individual user.
    • If you want a wider general acceptance then sadly Matrix is DoA. WhatsApp becomes a huge choice outside USA and China but it has started becoming shittier by the day and looking at who has become WhatsApp’s global head now, I don’t think it’s gonna get any better (check his last “app” or company’s screenshots and come here if you don’t end up vomiting). So Signal or maybe some other similar app. You are limited by societal trends and acceptance here, not the tech or finesse or privacy of an app.
    • If you just want privacy and a simpler app, proven (at least so far), then well Signal it is, as much as I hate it for reasons they decided to make it a centralised messaging app and then stuffed crypto in it etc.

  • Currently Ente - looking for a replacement. Ente’s apps are non-native and it shows - really sluggish and poor. I wish they would prioritise that, but they don’t. But this is not really a backup - it’s a sync - and like a shadow of iOS Photos app on iOS because, well, those APIs are not natively accessible to other apps on iOS. Ente is more like Google Photos’ FOSS and E2EE alt.

    For actually backing up my personal data (including videos and photos) I use:

    1. borgbase (with borg’s GUI Vorta; FOSS and E2EE)
    2. backblaze b2 (using restic’s GUI backrest; FOSS and E2EE) – these both have exactly the same personal data being backed up.
    3. then there’s tarsnap (this is a much smaller - must save at all costs - data set). Tarsnap is very unwieldy (literally stuck in time - not in a good way) but I have been backing up since long and I do not have another reliable solution. Its client code is readable publicly - don’t know it’s FOSS or not; apparently not. But E2EE.

    (1 and 2 are really great apps!)

    I also use a sync tool with a lifetime plan (but it sucks and I am finding a replacement, so won’t even name it; it says E2EE but they are so irresponsible that I removed anything sensitively personal from sync set). PS. This was my first and last lifetime anything of my life.