Just as a warning, this is licensed under the AGPL, with a CLA that requires copyright assignment. So, they could pull the rug at any time:

2.3 Outbound License. Based on the grant of rights in Sections 2.1 and 2.2, if We include Your Contribution in a Material, We may license the Contribution under any license, including copyleft, permissive, commercial, or proprietary licenses.

nlnet is the main one that comes to mind.

How much money do you donate?

I am very privileged to have some money left over after fulfilling essential needs. So, I set a fixed amount a while ago, and then whenever I am able to make a saving (e.g. switching to a cheaper phone plan) or get a pay rise (if it ever comes), I’ll put some of the gains into donations.

When do you donate?

I remember reading somewhere that many organisations prefer regular donations to one-off donations, even if the regular amount is smaller, since it helps them plan better. So I always give regular donations, even if the amount is smaller to compensate.

I have everything set up as automatic donations in liberapay and OpenCollective. So, it’s pretty seamless!

If anyone ever wants to gift me anything, I’ll ask for them to consider a donation to a project instead.

Do you have a minimum donation amount?

I try to avoid payments under £5. Below that point, way too much of the money goes to fees. For some projects where I donate a small amount, I donate yearly instead of monthly instead.

How do you decide what projects to support? Do you forego donations if you’ve contributed in other ways?

I don’t donate to every project I benefit from, but I care a lot about XMPP and Linux on Mobile, so I donate mainly to projects in these areas. I’ve also contributed code to some of these projects, but I keep donating as I want to support the ongoing maintenance as well as just individual features.

Do you donate to all equally or do you have some sort of ranking? Is it by amount of use, subjective preference, something else?

I care about XMPP as a whole succeeding, so I donate to many projects I don’t even use myself. I wanted to donate to clients and servers for each major platform, so I split the clients like this:

• iOS clients: 1 project
• Android clients: 1 project
• Linux clients: 4 projects
• Server software: 1 project

Then, I donated an equal amount to each platform (so, for example all the Linux clients combined would get the same as the single Android client).

However, since I was donating so little to each Linux client, I decided to gradually increase the amount I donate to those over time.

I’ve also recently started donating to libraries / ancillary projects in the same space. But I don’t have much money left to play with for them, so the amount is smaller :(

Linux on Mobile is simpler as I only donate to two projects, so I just donate equally to both.

So, long story short, it started with some kind of structure, but has become more subjective since then :)

What platforms do you prefer using? Liberapay, Opencollective, Patreon, ko-fi, Paypal, Monero, actual post?

I really like liberapay, especially as it mostly works without Javascript. But Opencollective is pretty nice too. If the developer themselves gives a preference, I’ll normally use that platform.

One thing I’m interesting in knowing is - do people generally prefer donating to fewer projects, but with bigger amounts, or vice versa? One criticism of my approach is that, because I am spread quite thin, I risk not really helping any project that much, whereas if I focused on one or two projects, at least those could benefit a bit more.

You probably already know this, but for those unaware, Fractal and nheko already work great on mobile linux.

It’s not perfect yet, but it’s much, much better than the old days.

OMEMO is supported by every major client, and they interoperate successfully. Unfortunately, most clients are stuck with an older version of the OMEMO spec. It’s not ideal, but it doesn’t cause any practical issue, unless you use Kaidan or UWPX, which only support the latest version.

All popular clients and servers support retrieving chat history now too.

In practice, I’ve been using it for several months to chat with friends and family, and haven’t had any issues.

Yep, that’s the gist of it. In order to change the license from the GPL, they’d need the permission of all of the copyright holders who’ve contributed code under the GPL to the project. After a few months have passed, this basically makes it impossible (or at least extremely difficult) since at least one person (and likely many people) will say no.

It was just from cycling. Perhaps he just got unlucky though? From the sounds of things his experience seems like an outlier. Or he was just so fast that the vibration frequency matched that of a motorbike 😁

One thing to be aware of is that riding around a lot with the phone attached can cause the stabilisation sensor in the camera to go wrong. When this happens your camera feed starts wobbling around all the time. This happened to a friend of mine and let’s just say his snapchat stories had a very distinctive look :)

I’m not sure whether more expensive mounts do a better job with this (I think his was quite cheap) but make sure to do your research if you’re planning on using it a lot, and you care about your phone’s camera.

They have also funded a lot of improvements to XMPP clients and servers.

Now: terrorists are terrorists, right wing rioters are terrorists, climate protestors are terrorists and misogynistic people are terrorists.

Soon: asylum seekers are terrorists, people who go on strike are terrorists, members of the opposition party are terrorists.

I support reducing violence against women, but prevent is the wrong tool for this problem. If the government actually want to address this instead of just looking like they are, I feel they should take an approach that actually works. We need:

• More consistent and holistic sex education, from a younger age
• Explicitly teaching about sexual violence, the services available and the punishments for doing it
• Investing in local policing, so that there is bandwidth to look into these cases
• Giving more funding to charities who support domestic abuse survivors
• Training for police, so they actually listen to women when they raise concerns at an earlier stage, instead of waiting until it’s too late
• Tougher sentencing for any form of sexual violence

Prevent is both ineffective and discriminatory. It increases government surveillance, and raises the burden on GPs and teachers. The National Union of Teachers want to get rid of it, the Communities and Local Government Committee found a multitude of problems that haven’t been fixed, and human rights orgs like Liberty and Amnesty International want to get rid of it too. It doesn’t work and in many cases has made things worse.

Thank you for taking the time to write this, LibRedirect is so much better!

Unfortunately, I think it just picks randomly. I have had times where it has redirected me to an instance that is down. That said, if you have an instance you know is stable, it does give you a drop-down to always redirect to a specific one.

For me, it’s many of the ones people have already said, plus:

• StreetPass (seriously cool - collects the mastodon profile of any website you visit where someone has set up the special link to their profile)
• Video Speed Controller (gives you fine-grained control over video speed, e.g. watching video at 2.6x speed)
• Privacy redirect (automatically redirects to various services, e.g. from Twitter to Nitter - can select a random instance each time)

Agreed, it’s licensed under the MPL, a “weak copyleft” license. Each file that is MPL must remain MPL, but other files in the same project can be permissive or even proprietary.

While I definitely think it’s better than a fully permissive license, it seems more permissive than the LGPL, which is the main license of WebKit and Blink. So I don’t feel it’s strong enough to stop it being co-opted.

I really wish there was a GPL-licensed rendering engine and browser, accepting community funding, with some momentum behind it.

I feel Ladybird have correctly identified the problem - that all major browsers and engines (including Firefox) get their primary source of funding from Google, and thus ads. And the donations and attention they’ve received show that there is real demand for an alternative.

But I think the permissive license they have chosen means history will repeat itself. KHTML being licensed under the LGPL made it easy for Google to co-opt, since it was so much easier to incorporate into a proprietary (or more permissively licensed) codebase.

There is Netsurf, but the rendering engine understandably and unfortunately lags behind the major ones. I just wish it was possible to gather support and momentum behind it to the same extent that Ladybird has achieved.

Agreed completely!

I think there are two main schools of thought - one is to buy linux-first mobile devices, and the other is to make linux work on android devices people already have.

At the moment, linux on android devices is in a better state. From what I read, calls, battery, suspend etc. generally works well on the OnePlus 6/6T and Pocophone F1.

For the linux-first approach, I’m very fortunate to have both a PinePhone Pro and Librem 5. They are both improving, and I’ve been daily driving one or the other for a couple of years, but they do still involve some sacrifice. I’m not sure they’re ready for “regular people” yet, but they keep getting better.

Personally, apart from buying the devices themselves, I prefer to contribute directly to the projects focusing on the software. I feel you can’t go wrong supporting PostmarketOS and Mobian. They are doing heroic jobs and have come a huge way in a few short years. Because they work upstream-first, any benefits one achieves are shared with everyone else in the ecosystem. And any benefits apply just as well to the linux-first phones as to the ones that originally ran android.

It’s a long mountain to climb, but we’ve seen with Linux on the desktop that, over a period of years, things do get better. You used to have to pick your hardware carefully to get Linux installed. Now, you can install it pretty much anywhere, and most likely everything will work.

I feel eventually, the hardest problem in getting people to switch will be that proprietary apps won’t work well. I think all we can do is to improve our free software alternatives to the existing ones, especially those with network effects like chat apps, as much as we can.

Every small step we can take is an important one. It’s easier to get people to switch to Linux if they already use free software, as free software often does a better job targeting Linux than proprietary software does. Meanwhile, it’s easier to get people to switch to free software if they run Linux, as that’s the path of least resistance on that OS.

My fear is that they will start off by applying this to Messenger, WhatsApp etc. Then, in a few years, when criminals and tech-savvy people move to XMPP etc, they will say “the laws aren’t working, we need to apply it at the OS level instead”, and since iOS and Android have a big market share it’s very easy for them to do it. At that point, trying to communicate with friends becomes very hard. It’s one thing to get them to switch apps, but asking them to switch phone or OS is a whole other hurdle.

I’m trying to contribute both code and money to make XMPP, and mobile linux as good as possible before that can happen. I feel we need to buy time, by delaying and delaying chat control as much as possible, to make the free software, federated systems better and appealing to regular people. And then we can use that technology to buy time to push for political changes. I feel the only long-term solution here will be a political, rather than technical one.

It all feels like an impossible task, but I feel all we can do is try as hard as we can to make the world more like the one we want.

I originally suggested Monal to my friend (who is quite into iOS and really appreciates a well designed application) and she found the same, but then she tried Siskin, and was happy enough to use it to this day.

Just for reference, here are my favourites on each platform.

Each support modern XMPP extensions, interoperate very nicely with each other, and (at least in my opinion) look good!

• Android: Conversations
• iOS: Siskin
• Windows & Linux: Dino
• Mac OS: Beagle IM
• Web: Converse JS

As a note of caution, I used Oracle’s free tier to run a personal Matrix server, and it got deleted without any advance warning after a few months. I migrated to another provider and haven’t had any issues for 2+ years now.