Certainly not as powerful as common office suites, but https://cryptpad.fr/ is not only open-source but also has already running instance (and has end to end encryption for your documents)

https://syncthing.net/ is a good general file synchronizer. Requires devices too be online simultaneously to sync, but gives you transport encryption with forward secrecy.

It’s probably the best one when it comes to web-based videocalls. I had much better experience with native apps (e.g. Mumble) when it comes to sound quality though.

Original WhatsApp was XMPP with phone number for your username. Pretty much what https://quicksy.im/ does now.

WhatsApp today is completely different beast.

It’s been a year or two, but last time I tried it their app worked fine on x86 Android in qemu. Not the most efficient way to run it, but at least it’s isolated from the rest of the system.

Slight difference is that Zuck has had control from the start, whereas other companies might have had “don’t be evil” leadership that was… optimized away for financial reasons.

Not that it really matters nowadays. Just an observation.

Re profiling, I don’t think instances will bother doing that (unless they start running ads). However, they also don’t prevent anyone from building that profile themselves from observable behavior. And creating such database might constitute original work by itself. Now, they don’t get as fine-grained interactions as you would with tracking-infested sites. But they will get the most valuable ones such as active participation.

It’s been doing the exact opposite and implementing more targeted advertising after several previous monetization attempts (including a cryptocurrency integration) flopped.

Similarly the feature set is increasingly locked behind “premium” paywall.

It’s headed in no good direction if you ask me.

I call BS on that. Large-scale content scraping was already against the TOS to begin with. And you can’t kill off slow stealth scraping without also blocking search engine crawlers. Or at least not without hurting the searchability.

State authorities aren’t bound by GDPR. That’s something that’s explicitly stated in it.

Oh wow, this is great news. I expect there will still be uncomfortably many dubious black boxes left there. But it’s certainly a step in the right direction. For me the sticking point with AMD was always shoddy SW/FW/drivers shipped with superior (compared to their biggest competitor anyway) hardware design. It’s good to see them conceding that and outsourcing to open source community rather than some dubious third party.

Though for the time being if you want truly open firmware get a POWER chip instead. If you can afford it.

I feel like both of these are extremely location dependent. From my friends across North America I know that network connectivity can be very very poor if you aren’t living close to a big city.

And as far your example with school goes, I’ve seen the polar opposite happen where all kids got a mandatory Teams or Google account (depending on school) fairly early into the lockdowns.

Maybe subcontinents are still too big to generalize about from one person’s experience. :-)

Enter https://yourinstance.example.com/c/somecommunity@otherinstance.example.com into your URL bar and it should come up after a bit and let you subscribe. Some instances have blacklists you can find under the “Instances” link down bottom, but usually this should do the trick.

I’m probably missing something, but wouldn’t it be far easier to redirect people to install page of extension for their respective browser? Such extension could then transform the button as needed to point to whichever social web instance.