Scott

You 100% should.

I bought a second-hand Pixel, installed GrapheneOS the moment it arrived and never looked back.

I recently installed Curve for contactless NFC payments. Their support is terrible but, after some teething issues, it works without any problems.

Hosted on GCP?

I run the older iteration of the software. Works well.

Well, duh.

Element is UK and EU-based, not US-based.

I run a complete, self-hosted Matrix stack including bridges to WhatsApp, Slack, Telegram and Signal as well as Element Call (Livekit) and MAS (the new authentication system).

I don’t think there’s any shortcuts. You just need to install them and work through any issues, one-by-one. Start with just the homeserver (Synapse, don’t bother with anything else yet) and add one component at a time and get it working before moving to the next.

I will say that having a decent knowledge of reverse proxies, networking, DNS and certificates will help you greatly. Having a solid understanding of Docker (if you’re using Docker) would be of great benefit too.

It should be much easier today than it was five/six-odd years ago when I started; things are more polished now than they were then.

Haha. Oops. I should have checked first. Well done.

… or just publish the source on Github and let someone else continue the legacy.

They’re just hosting existing FOSS alternatives.

Yep!

I achieve this on my own SearxNG configured with the hostnames plugin.

Say goodbye to LinkedIn, Pinterest, Facebook, TikTok and Instagram.

In Element, no.

In Nextcloud, yes.

Matrix allows for time-based location sharing. The Element clients have it implemented.

Also Nextcloud with the Phonetrack application installed. I use the uLogger app on Android for 24x7 location recording and it uses less than 2% of the battery over a day.

Not with this setup, no. I specifically didn’t want The Algorithm™ involved.

It’s much more lightweight, handles Plex integration much better and automatically cuts out ads, promotions, etc.

I moved from TubeArchivist to Pinchflat. Very good.

I’m running GrapheneOS and have no idea what things look like on the fruity phones.

I do this. I self-host rather than use Beeper but the effect is the same. Single client (Element) to my own Matrix server (Synapse) with bridges to WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram and Slack.

https://localsend.org/

Containers are just processes with flags. Those flags isolate the process’s filesystem, memory [1], etc.

The advantages of containers is that the software dependencies can be unique per container and not conflict with others. There are no significant disadvantages.

Without containers, if software A has the same dependency as software B but need different versions of that dependency, you’ll have issues.

[1] These all depend on how the containers are configured. These are not hard isolation but better than just running on the bare OS.