I would love to work for or with Murena on their /e/-OS phone. UnifiedPush support is one of the first things I would propose to do.
UnifiedPush is in my humble opinion one of the most important recent developments for freedom phones. It grants us freedom from Google’s near monopoly push notification system FCM. I have followed the development of UnifiedPush it from its OpenPush origins.
What have I done so far?
I have deployed ‘ntfy’, a UnifiedPush compatible server implementation, on my home network. I documented and published my installation script (which uses Ansible and Docker), and successfully submitted it for inclusion in the popular Matrix installer matrix-docker-ansible-deploy, so matrix self-hosters can deploy it easily.
My self-hosted push service now serves notifications to several of the apps I use.
If given the chance to advance UnifiedPush support, I would propose a plan something like this:
deploying a UP server for /e/ users (one for the Murena central server, and one in each self-hosted deployment), initially choosing one of the existing kinds of UP server (probably NextPush because obviously it's built to fit into nextcloud);
creating a UP distributor as an /e/-OS system app, by adapting an existing one (NextPush, to match the server), and making it auto-discover/configure the server from the /e/-OS account info;
working with important client apps (/e/-OS default apps first) to add support to them;
perhaps tweaking the U.P. server and distributor to better suit this use case, if and when needed.
Resources around development of camera apps, camera API standards, and photos management, in Indie Phones, degoogled Android, Murena /e/-OS, Purism Librem, etc.
With sustained dedication from their producers working with very limited budgets, these alternatives are coming along nicely and by now are certainly usable. Understandably, however, they are not yet as slick as those funded (and controlled) by the mega-corps Apple and Google.
There is much more to be done to bring the indie phones up to a level of sophistication that ordinary people find a pleasure to use and to trust. In this article I look at one rather technical aspect of it: what developments do we need on the infra side?
I have been trying out a matrix-based blog comments system.
WriteFreely is a simple self-hosted blogging system. It uses Markdown for content. To let readers subscribe to follow new posts, it supports both RSS and ActivityPub (Fediverse). It has no comments system of its own.
Cactus Comments is a simple self-hosted comments system. It lets us add a comments section to any web page we control, such as a blog. It uses Matrix for the comments.
I recently framed a take on this issue as “FOSS Apps Live In FOSS App Stores”. Free (Libre) Open Source Software apps should be distributed in such a way as to be available to everyone, not only to Apple's and Google's users.
I wish our children could grow up making their digital footprints in their own digital gardens. In the current system our children visit shopping malls run by the Big Tech companies whose business model is to find every way to maximise profit from their “users”.
This is my list of Open EdTech resources that I see as helpful toward my goals.
“Your Google Account will soon be considered as inactive“
”... if you don't sign in soon”
“Is this a phishing scam?” was my first thought. But no, it's true! This officially confirms I am freed at last from Google's clutches on my data, on my digital life.
Hurray!
I once thought Google was my friend. The most convenient email, the most convenient search, a great phone, with a feeling of being quite open-source-y, not too locked-in. But of course their lock-in is immense, almost inescapable, just like all the other Big Tech silos. Once disillusionment set in, it was hard to leave that all behind. Took me five years.
Now, for months and months I haven't signed in to my gmail, to play store, to youtube, nothing.
This is my POSSE copy of announcements I posted to the Matrix Community Year In Review 2022, which was subsequently published on Nico's blog and on Matrix.org's blog.
