Full stack developer and privacy advocate. I like to keep the mentality, if you can program one language well, then you can program in any language!

  • 5 Posts
  • 69 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • OP I appreciate the reasoning.
    But I’d advise against it,
    and would recommend users to delete their Facebook account asap.

    Why? 4-5 years ago I already noticed the “illusion of free speech” on Facebook.

    The platform is a data farm,
    but I’m a data privacy advocate,
    so I regularly posted data privacy articles/tools.

    Which went against the best interest of Facebook, so they simply held back that content from nearly everyone’s feed, resulting in it getting nearly zero attention.

    But if I posted a dumb meme,
    it would get a lot of attention.

    I’ve asked around to friends back in the day who where scrolling online if they saw my data privacy posts, none did.

    So staying on the platform to advertise things that go against Facebooks best interest, will likely not yield good results.

    However deleting your account,
    is a great conversation starter that can easily be directed into WOM (Word of Mouth) marketing, to teach your friends and family about Fediverse tools.


  • Yes Fediverse software can challenge the tech giants,
    but we can and must expect them to fight against it as soon as it gets on their radar!

    They’ll likely will attempt to do so by:

    • Censorship: Keeping it out of the feeds/search results of their users.
    • Propaganda: Putting it in a bad spotlight (e.g. marking it as security risks on their own platforms).
    • Direct Attacks: E.g. DDoS attacks and/or bot user networks spreading bad content on the Fediverse platforms.

    We should already try to harness ourselves against the direct attacks.
    And help with spreading Fediverse software through WOM (Word-Of-Mouth) marketing,
    since the tech giants certainly will not help it spread themselves.

    The Fediverse is one of the few sparks of hope I have remaining lately,
    let us ignite these sparks together into something bright!








  • There’s 2 parts to this:

    • Android Auto app (on your phone)
    • Android Auto Head Unit software (in your car)

    Both of which are currently proprietary,
    and would need to be written as FOSS from the ground up by reverse engineering the above 2, which would be a huge undertaking.

    Also flashing custom Head Unit software to your car will be very hard, is not well documented, and likely will void your warranty, giving low incentive for developers to even attempt it :/

    The best you can do right now is aa4mg (Android Auto 4 MicroG),
    which at least allows to replace the proprietary Google Play services with a privacy respecting FOSS alternative and Android Auto’s dependencies with empty stub packages:
    https://github.com/sn-00-x/aa4mg

    Full disclosure,
    I helped with writing aa4mg :)



  • Believe me, I’d love to ditch Github!

    But it’s a really though bullet to bite for me…

    It kinda acts as my CV for when I’d apply for a new job, and in my nearly 10 years on the platform I’ve accumulated a nice follower and star count to prove my worth as a developer, which is hard to regain on smaller more privacy respecting platforms like Codeberg or Forgejo…

    Perhaps it’s time to move to Codeberg though.
    If I’d do so I will probably:

    1. Initially mirror the repo’s to Codeberg
    2. Notify the users about scheduled date to move to Codeberg
    3. Archive the Github repo’s and finalize move to Codeberg


  • Thank you, that’s already a nice start! 🙂

    But I was mostly hoping to block the UI elements,
    e.g. today they added a Copilot button,
    and they also moved the search bar,
    and replaced it’s old position with “ask copilot”.

    Would be lovely get the feel of the old Github UI back
    with all the Copilot references filtered out.

    Edit: Figured it out, check my main post edit for the filters!