hendrik

Yeah, I doubt anyone runs it, because if you follow the instructions and click on the link to the server code, it’s just missing. And the empty repository has been sitting there since May… There isn’t any Android app in the Appstore either, so you wouldn’t be able to install anything. Seems all “Circulus” is, is a shiny website with (made-up?) advertisement text.

(And by the way, if you decide to self-host some of the standard open-source messengers… You can always just disable Federation and disallow sign-up. That way XMPP or Matrix won’t be able to connect to anyone else, except the people you invited to your server. And there’s this messenger overview, it doesn’t talk about kids-features, but maybe it’s useful nonetheless: https://www.messenger-matrix.de/messenger-matrix-en.html )

Yeah, Some people here really love drama and to fight other people online, preferably on a personal level. PieFed has become target of that. I don’t think it necessarily means a lot, other than we’re some high drama online place. There wasn’t any one software vs another one involved.

But everyone is allowed to pick their favorite software. They’re both fine from a technical perspective. You’ll get some different perks, but it’s all the same Threadiverse. I myself like PieFed better, including which side of drama they end up on. But YMMV. If OP wants to start on a new journey, they’re entitled to do whatever they like. Main thing with side quests is to do something in the first place. That’s more important than the exact details.

(Btw, I’ve also been using Lemmy for quite a while… It’s not like I’m in my comfort zone all the time.)

Yeah, being conservative isn’t how awesome new hobbies start. You need to leave your comfort zone 😂

Why not host a PieFed instance instead? Similar but more features and easier to maintain. Does have some scraper countermeasures built in, so maybe you don’t even need Cloudflare. Also as a next project after that, you could learn Python and contribute to the project.

I wish my friends and family did the pre-screening of messages and their importance to me as well 😆 I get important messages and silly memes all mixed in the same group chats, so it’s impossible for me to tell whether I need to pick up my phone.

Background will do. I think even swiping it away is fine, as long as you don’t force-close it. Just pay attention there is some Play store or Aurora store doing automatic app updates. I skipped on the updates and once WhatsApp hadn’t been updated for several months, they closed the connection.

I run continuwuity and the mautrix-whatsapp bridge. It’s not 100% reliable, but close enough for me. Especially after I moved it from the NAS in my basement to a VPS in some datacenter. I occasionally had some issues with my ISP doing maintenance, a power outage at home… I let WhatsApp run on my kitchen tablet 24/7 so it keeps that 14 day timer running. To my knowledge that’s unavoidable unless you switch WhatsApp Business or something.

And I like Continuwuity way better than Synapse and the ridiculous amount of resources it uses to forward text messages.

But yeah, silently dropping the connection isn’t great at all. I think the only proper solution is to nag people into using a different messenger. Signal is relatively straightforward to use, made for average people and comes with the same functionality as WhatsApp.