One of my banks properly uses TOTP which is independent & the other uses SMS which isn’t secure, but is also independent. I would straight up leave a bank if an app was required since there are always other options.

Family is the easiest to convert since they have unconditional love for you & would me the easiest to understand your concerns. You could even roll out a Snikket instance for everyone to use together.

You can still use cash & websites for banking tasks. You chat should be on an open source protocol so there is bound to be an application or web app for that too.

Cheogram has a better featureset on Android in my experience. Movim has quite a lot of features & good performance for a web app—which covers the folks that “don’t want to install any new apps” (generally the right skepticism, but really most F-Droid ones are safer with less worry), or platforms without good clients. The biggest pushback I have heard was bad iOS clients—but being a self-hostable service with almost exclusively free software clients, it should be of no surprise any iOS dev is lackluster, being an entirely closed platform, anti-GPL, & with a hefty fee just to list an application.

We had this in XMPP a decade ago & they could have readopted the open standard instead of creating a new one. There is no track record of them not bending the rules to benefit just them anyhow—but this time it was developed exclusively by the tech giants which is absolutely for their benefit with nestled enclaves to meet the bare minimum requirements while still building the garden’s walls higher. Cabal-ass behavior.

The adaptors are flimsy and hang funny. Both of these options are putting additional strain on the only port for charging & data transfer—which is also making you choose audio or charging / transfer. Or they want to push you into buying irrepairable, flaky, branded earbuds what generally have worse audio quality & always having latency. When all non-phone devices are still understandably using the standard 3.5 mm jack, why give any money & reward these companies putting out devices with user-unfriendly IO when I can support one that does meet my needs?

You can make Linux more secure by various means, & we will never get to a better state until early adopters start adopting the ecosystems. I would rather do this than support more Google ecosystem stuff.

GrapheneOS doesn’t really give you choice. This isn’t cool to me—& you will have a hard time convincing me otherwise since there are plenty of precautions I can take with my setups & my threat models without being told there is only one option.

I laugh at the folks that think Ladybird will save us. If their project’s developers & contributors & bug reporters require using the data-sucking Discord & MS GitHub with no alternatives, what makes anyone think they would take privacy seriously?

I will never by a portable device without a headphone jack so that completely cuts off GrapheneOS which must follows the whims of Google Pixel designs. Instead I am currently trying out Sailfish OS on a Xperia 10 to use Linux—which hopefully can break me from the Google ecosystem.

Less than 30? Self-host an Ejabberd server on an old desktop under some desk for private message & multiuser chats + Jitsi which handshakes over the same protocol as the chats, XMPP. If you need some unified UI for everyone & a bit of posts, Movim can also sit on top of the XMPP server. If need need some low-latency, low-resource audio chat, let folks idle in a Murmur server.

Matrix uses way too many resources & is way too slow/inefficient at the protocol level.

We can & should demand at least gateways & mirrors if not at least a single alternative. Considering they have funding, they can self-host to actually control a forum or chat room as well as a code mirror (even if just HTTP with no forge). Folks are also undervaluing how some users are banned from access to these US-based platforms under US sanctions.

The pro-FOSS stance would be to get your communications off of being exclusively proprietary platforms. Developer & early adopter freedom & privacy matters—but instead they are choosing Discord & Microsoft GitHub as their only platforms.

Impossible to take them seriously if they have already started off on the wrong foot using exclusively megacorpo proprietary platforms for coms. If your developer / testers privacy doesn’t matter since they opted for Microsoft GitHub & Discord, what would lead you to believe their project would take privacy seriously?

Green washed. If they cared about sustainability they wouldn’t have removed the headphone jack for longer-lived headphones—and instead started selling their own branded Bluetooth earbuds like the rest of the manufacturers.