is as scam. if you’re already receiving unsolicited shit, what’s the thought process behind being courteous with them motherfuckers? go nuclear on them, that whole industry lost its benefit of doubt privileges a decade ago.

we had the centralised model (big corpos hosting all of the stuff) because our devices were shit and internet access was rare and precious. nowadays, with ever-present internet, when my $50 pocket computer has 8 cores and 8 GB RAM, the laptop many times that, let alone the desktop, we should be moving to Pied Piper’s vision of a decentralised internet and dedicate all of our resources to that goal.

I’ve been a part of the fediverse some while now and I admit, I didn’t understand it fully. I operated under the premise that whoever put this thing together and then spent their time and energy promoting it has thought this through and then seeing more and more people jumping on, I took it as validation of that idea.

a few years down the road, I have a better understanding, and I don’t really like it. it’s wasteful and disorganized and I don’t see a way where some order out of this chaos emerges.

I thought it’s a sort of fail-over distribution of content. so if lemmy.bing is offline/gone, you can interact with lemmy.ding or lemmy.bong and access all data and post and comment and whatnot. not so, when ding is gone, it’s gone. its radiated content may be present on other instances, but still there’s a ton of issues that way.

instead, I believe a decentralised and distributed system, with no single point of failure, no admins spending their hard earned cash on maintaining lemmy or mastodon instances or, god forbid, dedicated hardware in the vein of i2p or similar, should be the end goal.

very cool, top of the line, if the battery is in good condition, it’ll serve you a long time. wish lenovo went with 2x RAM slots, not just 1x. keep a lookout for cheap docks if you wanna run it with external stuff (monitors, LAN, etc.) - game changer.

heads-up, although it says 4750, that’s a 3000-series Ryzen (Zen 2) and as such has intermittent linux issues wrt power management. a coupla kernel switches and/or other tweaks may be needed, dependent on the kernel your distro’s using. sold mine a while ago so can’t remember the deets, but overall the switches I needed for Zen 2 to reliably sleep and wake aren’t needed for Zen 3 (5000 series).

“my foot itches, what’s the best shotgun I can get to blast it off”. this is like problemXY.

a 2-year old ex-flagship is a beast of a device. how do I know? because I run a 7-year old not-flagship and it’s a beast. you tear google’s shit out and keep using it. you can even keep using GCam with a “yeah-playservices-is-present” faker and then disable GCam’s network access.

Google is an adversary. start treating it as such.

raspberries were viable while those were cheap. I think I got a 3b (plus?) in pre-deficit years for like $25 second-hand AND I got some shitty case AND a microSD card AND it could run off of a somewhat normal USB phone charger. so using those instead of a 10 year old decommissioned desktop was an awesome value proposition.

nowadays, those devices are encroaching on trip-digits territory and the power adapter is like $30. the computing power you can buy for a third of that designates raspberries exclusively for niche use cases where footprint and power consumption are primary considerations.

not to mention fake Jason Statham just rubs me the wrong way, like all them “visionaries”. he makes this sound like he’s the head of Feed Africa or something, on a noble mission to save humanity and whatnot.

it’s not “forever”. it’s however long they don’t have any ideas to the contrary.

why it was implemented - so that executive #279 can show executive #114 that number go up. look how our engagement is rising! look at all them people downloading our app! when I took over from exec #317, number was this big, lookie now!

same way google made their search worse, so you have to search multiple times, thus upping the engagment, page views, etc. and then exec X goes to exec Y and say “look there’s a huge rise in searches where my bonus at!”

you must’ve me confused with someone who does shit on your behest, go find out yourself.

this is just for onlookers, as it’s obvious it’s weirdo’s shill: the term in the ToS is “all comms must be readable by all other clients” which an E2EE capable client would be in breach of and would be promptly kicked off telegram’s infra, as was mentioned by those same FOSS developers in lemmy threads regarding that subject. as for you, plonk.

except, implementing E2EE via 3rd party FOSS clients is explicitly against Telegram’s TOS, which I’m gonna assume you already know as you’re parroting weirdo’s stance “all crypto is broken by NSA, so we’re better off without”. take care.

appreciate the effort, but kinda went overboard with the deets :) I run several prosody XMPP servers so I’m familiar with the underlying tech. what you describe should be feasible with it as well, but there are constant issues with devices not being able to access history, so I was wondering if things were better on your end.

so, based on this, I’ll spin up a snikker docker and try it out for a coupla weeks, see what’s what. many thanks.

edit: turns out this snikket thing is conversations (standard XMPP client) and prosody (XMPP server) with different branding.

your argument boils down to “the fully functional and loaded gun is in this weirdo’s holster and he won’t use it”.

the whole point is not relying on the benevolence of the weirdos out there and not letting them even be in the position to do any harm. encrypt my 1on1 comms and I don’t give a fuck what happens in the pedo/terror/carding/etc public groups. ample time to implement that in the past decade+ and be on par with practically every messenger out there. but he/they won’t implement it, they insist on all your shit being in the “cloud”, in plaintext, forever. there is no scenario where there’s not a malicious intent behind that.

I’ve been using Telegram since the early days. it was phenomenal vs the crap of its day - magical, even. like many, I was enamored with the vision of durov the folksy hero battling the forces of evil (in a bozo nightmare) and bequeathing us this tech marvel.

but I can’t trust it with anything any more. if weirdo can’t be trusted about some stuff, then he can’t be trusted with anything. enough for me, YMMV.

sorry for reiterating, so cross-device sync is totally impossible? or just something you don’t use?

aside from the dogshit UX and the uber reliance on Evilcorp’s infra, having more than two devices (I know, shocker in this day and age!), the arduous migration process to a new device, the limited chat history (I think it’s 40ish days) and many more.

same way Telegram adamantly refuses to implement E2EE, and not only that, it actively prevents 3rd party devs (a number of clients are FOSS) from implementing it on their own.

both PJ Harvey and durov respond the same way when asked about any of them things - smokescreens, FUD, whataboutisms, etc.

any of them things woulda been acceptable in 2015, here’s a PoC looking for funding, limited devs and resources; remember TextSecure and RedPhone? nowadays, they are nothing short of malicious.

how’s the chat history with snikket? I had issues with prosody, namely multiple devices coming and going and maintaining the same chat history between all of them, as well when there’s a disconnect (device gone forever, new device connects)

just skimmed their confusing web site, it’s free for selfhosting, right?

although it’s interesting research, I think it’s a weak text if you’re even tangentially aware of Telegram’s bullshit narrative as it focuses on the wrong thing. the main point should be “this dude was caught lying on a number of occasions and throws out smoke-screens and FUD when confronted about super-simple stuff. therefore nothing that comes outta his mouth is to be trusted” which should’ve prompted a mass exodus from this bullshit platform a long time ago.

the way more important issue is the collective action problem of dumping this crapware - leave it for what?

I run XMPP and Matrix servers and use various clients, along with Signal. all of those things are fucking dogshit software, there isn’t one that can come close to Telegram’s UX. if you fell into a coma in 2014 and woke up now to Element of Fluffy or whatever, you’d think someone’s pulling your leg. this is what a decade of development looks like?!

http://archive.today/Ocm8S

this thing is so far off on the horizon based on “things we need”, it’s not even worth discussing. if you’re not a founder whose startup someone acquired for bags of cash and are looking for ways to burn it, skip reading.

the estimation of like $1200+ for the thing is so disgustingly off the mark, it’s comical.

instead of 20 teams creating their contenders form scratch, what’s truly needed in this space is scouting out the thinkpad of the existing models. something that’s a gen or two behind but still widely available with at least 8 GB and fast storage. original manufacturer is exiting production to focus on newer generation models and the subcontractor that actually makes them has the tooling to keep 'em coming.

who’s not gonna take a swing at using the thing when they can have the unit new for $200 or flash a used one for like $50? before you know it, you have a user base. then, when you have the user base and a proven track record, you can try inventing a new paradigm outta thin air.

buncha clowns ITT laughing at a dude trying to swim for the first time. OMG how does he not know how to X and Y lolz why don’t you flatpak bust a cap in they ass…

this was an exceptionally excellent writeup especially with the “day 7: can’t do thing. day 10: here’s how to do thing” from the perspective of someone who used windows for ever and invariably looks at the thing from that point of view. dude pulled of transitioning a laptop with a buncha esoteric peripherals and an nvidia desktop and made almost everything work!

also, major ups for using the single most excellent solution for beginners, Ubuntu, and not getting lost in “no true scotsman” garudas and arches and atomic thisandthats.

why do you think they insist on keeping it in cleartext? they had ample opportunities to implement E2EE in the past decade and finally bring telegram up to the level that’s standard for practically every messenger out there; please miss me with the private chat joke they have.

so, I just reopened the telegram client to check if I left something there, haven’t used in months and… damn. I forgot how phenomenally awesome the thing is, it almost hurts. all the memories, used it since it started for private and business shit. I maintain it’s the best UX on both mobile and desktop, bar none.

but all of that is fucking null and void when they won’t implement E2EE, and that’s not even the worst part. there’s a bunch of FOSS clients out there and adding on encryption would be trivial. nope, you try that shit, you’ll get kicked out. everybody’s free to draw their own conclusions, I’ve made mine and deleted chats and account.

for the presentation part, watch standup. watch them construct the story, the path they guide you through, how it all comes together. notice how they lay it out, every syllable, every stutter, how it’s all in the service of delivery. planting and harvesting the callbacks. inadvertently, you’ll start picking up on techniques and implementing them and you’ll notice people hanging on your every word.

as to the actual part converting them over, determine who you’re talking to. if people are aware of the issue but are apathetic about implementing change, that presents one set of issues. if they’re completely unaware that there’s a problem, you’re better off changing environments.

I have an easy job, in my roles I implement the privacy aspect for tech-illiterate people from a security standpoint and I have a dictatorial position - they have to listen to me. I also don’t have tech debt when I implement their IT strategy, i.e. there’s never an issue with an OS or app they love or are used to. all of that is way, way harder when faced with someone who can’t imagine life without a $1000 easily breakable/losable/stealable slab of glass with the blue bubble and the tiks and toks and whatnot.

edit: there’s this thing https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/24/what-i-discovered-when-i-asked-amazon-to-tell-me-everything-alexa-had-heard I just saw at HN. this dude having a blissfully ignorant walk down melancholy lane, pondering the details of his decade-long spyware-ridden life, completely oblivious to their most intimate family shit just being out there in the world, for anyone to abuse just so he can be a more effective consumer. reaching those people, although possible, is such a tremendous effort I don’t think it’s worth it.

what’s way more angering is the deliberate constant raising of prices. tech is supposed to get better and cheaper at the same time. what was thousands in '06 should be like $100 now. no, a desktop is still supposed to cost north of $1000 without a monitor.

mentioned it a coupla times, RX 570, a midrange GPU, was introed in 2017 at $170. nowadays, midrange starts at like $700?

that same year I bought a Redmi Note, a feature rich budget phone from a budget line for $140. nowadays, a comparable Snapdragon model with an insignificant performance and feature jump is $300+.