The more you look, the worse it gets.

I assume you need to pay for exit node hosting + traffic, right? Which would be comparable to the price of a classic VPN.

Seems like you have bigger issues than corporate surveillance.

Bikes are great.

Nice webcam filter, OP

Can’t decide what’s a better meme, this or installing Chrome over Edge 🤔🤔🤔

Very tired of reading what Musk says.

I guess the stuff I was worried about was contact list sharing, Google Advertising ID, installed app list, and who knows what else a native app can access. Good to know that Graphene has that protection, I guess I’ll worry less about using WA.

This is a good little story, I enjoyed reading it :)

Yes, having message history and a good desktop client are great benefits of a bridge.

Look up “Beeper”. It’s not about privacy, rather about convenience. They run bridges for you. Nothing went through the main app, but I had to authorize Beeper through WA as a separate session. It would die in 2 weeks with WA disabled, like I said, but I guess if I kept WA enabled this wouldn’t have happened.

I’ve seen WA mods (basically rebuilt .apk files), but I don’t know much about them, and therefore they seem shady.

This summer? I disabled the WA app on my phone, though, so there was no background activity.

My matrix app (an Element fork) had several bridges and multiple chats, I feel like they were all synching in the background. I haven’t noticed that when I was at home, but when I was camping, battery going from 100% in the evening down to 70% in the morning was a problem.

I used a setup like that, but there were 2 things that I didn’t like

• I had to keep Whatsapp on my phone and open it every 2 weeks, because without it the bridge would just die (so why not just use it anyway?).
• The app I had used a lot off battery, which was a dealbreaker for bike/backpacking trips.

Unlike some of you here, I actually do.

I was not asking for advice.

What I find really annoying about this community, is that no matter what you do, for some people it just won’t be good enough, and they will throw it in your face.

Probably because it’s hosted on a Windows machine.

As a former Windows user: this is true, you can disable most of the features you don’t like. I was doing that for many Windows versions, from 98 to 10.

However it was indeed fighting an uphill battle: there was more and more BS with every update, I felt that I couldn’t trust my computer, I had to check forums in order to know what’s the newest thing to turn off.

I am happier now without Windows, even though I had to learn a few new apps.

“You click on a reddit link but their certificate expired and the page isn’t opening”

We just don’t know if it attracts them.

For SMS/MMS, I find Right Messages to be quite good. For RCS, I don’t think there are any alternatives. And surely you know about the variety of messengers (Matrix, Signal, …).