Do install both the Play Store and Play Services if you want to use any Google app like YouTube or Maps (even some non-Google ones will need it). Then use a more private app store like Aurora and remove all permissions from the Play Store to strike a good middle-ground.

I unfortunately use play services on both my main profile and gaming profile (I had to make a seperate non Premission Manager X profile to be able to play games), but if you’re smart like Veronica in her GrapheneOS video, you can do a degoogled profile and a sandboxed profile!

If I could convince my family to contact me through Signal/Molly rather than Google Messages, maybe I could go completely degoogled on one profile. But alas.

Yay for the EU! Hopefully you guys get a law that will permanently enshrine your privacy rights (or rights to encrypted chats at least).

This place has groups that are singlemindedly bloodthirsty and happy to see people hurt, particularly in the US, and don’t have a problem stating so.

It’s so tiring. I did my job, I voted, I told my friends to vote, I send a few emails every now and then to my reps, I go to protests, I try to self host and avoid some companies, and I cheer when foreigners say they want to distance from the US. I live, still. But it’s hard to not feel like shit when every other post or comment is “If you guys love guns so much then use them,” and, “All Americans are trash and wanted this,” and, “If Nepal could do it, why can’t they do it too?”

It’s exhausting to hear. It’s not that simple. We can’t just solve every political issue with weapons and violence, because then you just get another tyrant pn the throne eventually. We are not all racists who are eager to see our immigrant neighbors get kidnapped from the streets. I feel helpless about the suffering that is happening around me, and the fact that people who aren’t here experiencing it just get to joke, laugh, and shame makes it hard to stay on this site sometimes.

As a gen z, what school that uses online classroom environments and resources doesn’t give kids school-monitored tech? And for my district, our Chromebooks were HEAVILY locked down and monitored. I remeber trying to search the term “guitar latina” for a music project once and getting my search flagged because of “latina.” Most popular sites were firewalled/unaccessable (so .xxx domains were most likely blocked too). The terminal was literally disabled. Several system settings were disabled or unable to be edited. We couldn’t download programs, and most extensions were blocked (I think they eventually blocked them all). Hell, we couldn’t even change our desktop wallpaper.

Basically, at least at my middle and high school, it was very hard to access inappropriate material, and if you did, you were likely to get caught. Use cloudflare’s family dns (they have a whole setup guide) for your home network and any devices that aren’t fully locked down by the school (includes personal devices that aren’t school owned), and put parental control on so your kids can’t touch it.

If they get past all that, then congrats! You have kids who are very good at problem solving, searching the internet for info, and experimenting. All of which are great qualities for future cybersecurity professionals.

I still don’t truly know how to use docker, as I use dockSTARTer on my Debian VM on Proxmox, but it runns all my services now. I tried to resist and have multiple LXCs run everything, but as my homelab grew more complex (SMB & NFS, VPN tunnels, filesharing/hardlinks, etc.) I’ve just given up and have most things running on the docker. With dockstarter it’s enter “yes” to some terminal qs, copypaste templates into your overrides folder, and then use ds -u for update and ds -c to run everything.

I tried to use podman at first because people said it was safer and faster but… I literally couldn’t figure out how to turn a pod into a service so it will autostart on system launch 😅

Damn, I was gonna say just use web version, but they do often have missing features compared to app, so I understand why you had to download it…

If you’re looking for something to use with actual accounts (like banking), use hardened Firefox (with arkenfox) or a hardened chromium browser. Neither Mullvad Browser nor LibreWolf (and especially NOT Tor) are designed for that use case.

I wonder if my one bank doesn’t like Librewolf. I logged in no issue on Ungoogled Chromium, but got a “security warning” on LW. Meanwhile Discover doesn’t give a fuck and works when it wants to on either (read: never). Paypal worked fine on LW. I do use a Banking container on LW and turn off VPN, but banks are making it harder to go no app…

Can’t you just use Ublock with advanced mode on and have the same thing as NoScript?

Yeah, my brain dumb. Edited the original post to say 4.

It’s a shame, cause I generally like the design. But yeah the gloss and rounded corners does make me think of GPT. And that sidebar is doing the shitty “emoji in front of every sentence so you know what we mean right??? 🥺🥹😉😊😌”

Okay, how do you get sanoid & syncoid to run, because I’ve tried, and I’m just too dummy. When it makes a backup, is it literally making a zfs data record/pool/whatever on the other machine? Or is it more like a file? I have a Proxmox running cockpit (SMB & NFS) and the machine is connected to a USB drive bay that has ZFS. My immich is saving pictures to my ZFS drive bay via SMB.

I’ve tried to do

syncoid pool_name/data/immich root@cockpit.service.IP.addr:mnt/samba/backups

but I get hit with:

WARNING: ZFS resume feature not available on target machine - sync will continue without resume support.
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot Orico2tera4/data/immich@syncoid_nova_2026-01-27:13:38:44-GMT-05:00 to new target filesystem root@192.168.0.246:/mnt/samba/backups (~ 42 KB):
/dev/zfs and /proc/self/mounts are required.
Try running 'udevadm trigger' and 'mount -t proc proc /proc' as root.
44.2KiB 0:00:00 [ 694KiB/s] [===========================================] 103%            
CRITICAL ERROR:  zfs send  'Orico2tera4/data/immich'@'syncoid_nova_2026-01-27:13:38:44-GMT-05:00' | pv -p -t -e -r -b -s 43632 | lzop  | mbuffer  -q -s 128k -m 16M | ssh      -S /tmp/syncoid-root1921680246-1772385641-845218-1784 root@192.168.0.246 ' mbuffer  -q -s 128k -m 16M | lzop -dfc |  zfs receive  -F '"'"'/mnt/samba/backups'"'"' 2>&1' failed: 256

I’ve tried reading the github docs and some forums but I’m dummy. I just want to have backups that I can encrypt and keep in a cloud for cheap somewhere. Does it literally have to be two different machines (god I’m dumb)? Can I just auto run ZFS snapshots and encrypt then save those to Drive/OneDrive/Whoever?

Thank you for the wonderful response! I figured it was kinda like Fediverse, but I was lost if the difference in features caused issues with where your account was made. I made an account on conversations.im and now use Movim on browser and Conversations (from F-droid) on my phone. I need to start finding communities!

There’s this god forsaken fucking channel that keeps coming up on my YT music that is some AI generated slop parody songs of real songs, and they all have raunchy/18+ themes and names. I used to have a screenshot cause I thought I would post it but then I never did.

Anyway fuck them, and fuck YT Music for recommending me them.

Too young to actually exist (or gain consciousness ig) when Myspace was popular, but ain’t Facebook just Myspace but “better”? So therefore Frendica is “Fediverse Better Myspace”?

Thanks, this article was great. I guess I’ll finally check out XMPP, cause Matrix was… really mid when I tried it a few months ago and put me off. SimpleX was a mess too.

Side note, I get that the movim UI/Client is web only, but does that mean I can’t access Conversations.im (I know the app/client itself is Android only) on movim? I feel a little ashamed that I can’t understand this…

Uh yeah? I never said Pixels are Chinese. I use GOS on my Pixel 8a and I love it. I just don’t like the fact that Google is our only option right know if you want a degoogled phone that also cares about security.

And I also never said anything about app issues with Graphene? Most have worked flawlessly (I do have play services installed tbf), the only ones that didn’t were Paypal and my debit card bank (credit one works though), and in Veronica’s video I saw she had PayPal downloaded, so I guess they fixed it in the time that I tried to get it to work.

But I hope Linux phones become viable soon, as AOSP is a sinking ship as long as Google is the head of it.

• Wait for real Linux phones to become viable and use that in a couple years

God, as a GOS user I want this so bad. I know I can buy used, but having that G on the back of my phone feels dirty. I refuse to go back to Apple, Samsung sucks ass, and I don’t want Chinese phones, so I’m stuck here. But I want to be free.

I keep bitching about my Galaxy Tab A9+ and I will till the day I die. I fucking hate that thing for not having any Custom ROMs, and I despise the fact that it doesn’t allow OEM unlocking (afaik). I mean, it was a gift, so I still appreciate it, but MAN will I never buy Samsung with my own money ever.

Anyway I wish people would stop crying for Samsung Graphene while knowing full well that Samsung is essentially the Apple of the Android world; Locked down to all hell.

It’d be nice to not have to buy Google anything, but I want security, to be able to use most of my apps, and I don’t wanna buy a Chinese phone, so here we are.

That mentality is why teenage pregnancies happen. “Oh, just don’t do it kids! Sex is bad! Sex is only for adults!”

Schools and parent HAVE to do a better job about teaching kids how to actually be safe on the internet and how to interact with content on the internet. Keeping children uneducated only makes uneducated adults.

Plus there are so many children who need the internet for both learning purposes, and safety purposes. And also how the fuck would 18-20 year olds be able to do daily life things like have a job, have a bank account, and access government services without the internet.

Keep people educated, stop hiding them from uncomfortable and “dangerous” topics. Silence and ignorance is what governments and companies want.

We have kids protesting ICE on Roblox. Gen Z rebeled in Nepal with social media. Young people deserve freedom too.