Maybe Divest/Lineage could be an option instead. Although you have to choose a device wisely (and even among supported ones, some have trouble unlocking the bootloader), there is a chance you’d find a suitable cheaper one.

Personally no regrets spending $300 on a Pixel 7a but still painful to hand over this much.

The scam ones are those that are treated as stocks rather than digital cash.

To be fair, I wouldn’t trust stock Firefox indeed, as it also has bad defaults and has demonstrated disrespect to users’ consent (like turning on the ad tracking option without even informing anyone). I would rather opt for a hardening user.js or a fork with them pre-applied, like Librewolf.

complicated Android emulator setup

Wait, so a normal stock Waydroid/Bliss/Android-x86 wouldn’t work? They need some extra settings?

I encountered this in a computer club (I mean the place where you play per hour to play computer games on a good PC if you lack a suitable one at home). The accounts there were using phone numbers as usernames, and apparently if one is used, it would have to be verified. However, after refusing I was just given one-time accounts every time (with a random string of digits as the username), I just couldn’t save unspent time for another visit so had to pay precisely. Funnily enough, the host herself the first time mentioned one-time phone number rental services for this reason)

I don’t get it either. I would rather use 8-800-555-35-35 because of the catchy meme ad.

That is one hell of a donation, because no way unlimited data costs $50 a month :/

Excuse me, what kind of overpricing this is? ~$50 a month is insane for phone service, what kind of perks do they add on top to justify THAT? Cheaper to just buy a truckload of anon simcards and change them like gloves.

I recently got a 7a for $300, quite expensive for me but imo worth it. Maybe 8a, after the release of 9/9a, would also fall into a similar price, with 7a getting to $200 eventually.

Yes, absolutely. Having to use a dongle for my earbuds sucks :( SD is something I don’t really notice tho because 128 gigs is pretty much bottomless for a phone.

And from what I’ve seen, Pixels are probably the friendliest to other custom OSes as well.

I don’t feel anything abut nudity being posted somewhere and people enjoying it… I just don’t want to see it myself because it’s disgusting for me)

Prosody is very easy to set up. Snikket is just Prosody with things added on.

Now if only you could hide the pornographic stuff to not accidentally see disgusting nudity.

I have not checked both, but seems like both are insignificant. From what I understand, the messages and files are only stored on the server until reception.

I host a Simplex server, it is not that bad in terms of resources. My smp server is around 90 MB RAM and XFTP is 30 MB. Could be better, but still would run without problem on low-end hardware.

True! That’s why I much prefer federated protocols so that the cost (and data!) does not pile up in one specific place. You can end up paying for it - in form of your VPS bill or the cost of the hosting hardware.

if it’s free, you’re the product.

FOSS software existing proves this is not always true.

That is indeed a massive improvement, but until they allow multiple profiles per number - that would still mean either using the same account with internet randos as I do with IRL friends, or renting a whole other number and risking losing the account once the ownership of the number expires.

Depends on how you set it up. I had Wireguard installed and couldn’t figure out why only some sites got unblocked by it… And then it turns out it doesn’t use the VPN server’s DNS automatically, only if you specify so in the settings.

I am stupid, I know. But that’s just an example.