Otaku, gamer, self-taught programming student and professional procrastinator from Brazil. In fact, I am procrastinating at this very moment. I love boomer shooters too.

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  • 33 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: September 6th, 2021

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  • I’ve downloaded and tested it for a bit and it does look a bit too good to be true. The source code is licensed under AGPL, and the F-Droid app page didn’t show any anti-features. And I also really liked the app itself.

    However, while it does enable self-host of the same data (and it’s pretty easy too. you can even self-host from your phone! I wish more note apps did this) and manual exporting/importing, the cloud syncing (even to a third-party server of your choice) is locked behind a paywall. While I do understand paying for a service to save my data, it does bother me that I can’t sync with my own servers, which should not require any service from their part.

    The app also includes a login feature that lets you use a specific text-oriented Chinese social media (that also seems to be fully open source and AGPL licensed!). Honestly, I wouldn’t be bothered by it especially since it’s opt-in, and doesn’t seem to do anything with your notes unless logged-in. Though I don’t know how self-hostable it is, and even if it were, the app does not give me the option to enter my own server.

    And to top it all off, it has a bullshit AI feature (that seems opt-in). I don’t think I need to explain why this is very icky.

    Considering everything, it seems like an awesome app for people that use the specific social media it is optionally coupled with. But anyone that doesn’t and prefers to sync your data to a self-hosted server will be left without options. Also, you must consider that it apparently doesn’t seem to phone home, according to F-Droid, though it is very strange that the network, social media, and especially AI features are not mentioned at all as anti-features. So if you would want to be sure, I’d recommend you to read the source code and deduce yourself if it doesn’t phone anywhere you haven’t allowed to by default.

    I personally wouldn’t use it myself, but if you trust it doesn’t phone home, don’t care about manually exporting and importing your data, and isn’t bothered by the weird network features, I’d say it’s a great notes app.






  • Yeah, a lot of lemmy users were already into free software as a whole and liked lemmy because it’s libre and federated. So it’s only natural you see the focus on software freedom everywhere.

    I just think that we should strive to use libre alternatives, especially when they are as useful/better than closed source ones.

    The philosophical side of free software is much more important to me than anything else. For me, it’s not just about using open source software for the sake of it. It’s about software freedom.

    But I don’t go around telling everyone to use open source or die. If you just don’t like the libre alternative and prefer using closed source software, whatever. If there isn’t a general reason to use a closed source software, I’ll just point out the libre alternative (or try to convince that a somewhat inferior libre alternative may not be that bad) :)










  • Torch Browser is not open source, and it still is based on chromium. It’s the worst browser combination possible.

    Falkon is pretty cool! I prefer using qutebrowser if it’s gonna use QtWebEngine anyway. It is slower and less featureful than the main browsers, though. If you don’t mind it, I’d say go for it!

    I didn’t know about Dot Browser, but it looks… unfinished? It’s based on Firefox, so that’s cool. But it seems someone would be better off just using something like LibreWolf (or Tor if you actually want some privacy).






  • - yes*

    - yes, that is completely your choice

    - yes, though you could take a look at “wake on LAN”

    - yes, as much as your server can handle

    - I don’t think so

    * it’s totally possible setting up a server on Windows (depending on which version of Windows), but I must recommend using Linux, as that would be way easier to setup and maintain, and probably will be faster overall

    that seems a lot like my situation (though I’m just a student :P). awesome to see someone trying to self-host FOSS. best of luck to you!