Nah, I think paying Monero in the physical world is much like paying cash by mail for digital services - awesome but impractical. Why not use the right tools for each job? Better stick to Monero for the digital world and cash in the physical one.

Or a Raspberry Pi. Is more expensive ($60 for my Pi 3), but I think it was worth it due to versatility and privacy. Stock Android TVs would be uncomfortable as they spy on you.

To have a massive wall of video, you need to have a home spacious enough for a whole spare wall first! I haven’t seen a <1m screen that would fit in the kitchen corner my TV occupies on an arm - I don’t even think a projector would work with a screen this relatively small. And where would the projector itself go if opposite of that corner is the couch/bed? Sit on my lap?

I don’t think they would at least because the share of people who can use it is not that large. Where I am, only one carrier out of the big four has it, and only Samsung phones support it (Google as well, but they’re not officially sold so not quite as popular).

I tried Vanadium when the install was fresh. The adblocking is just not that good… For example, on one of the sites it blocked the ads, but left out the giant HTML elements they used to be in.

Weird, conduit.rs links an entirely different Gitlab page - https://gitlab.com/famedly/conduit, with the docs being at https://docs.conduit.rs/deploying/docker.html

I prefer Conduit instead of Synapse - it is lighter on resources.

I meant telemetry to Google and/or manufacturer. With grandma, I can at least install Linux on her laptop and say to message me there (that’s pretty much what I did with mom).

Yea, but a typical cellphone is not as easy to make private as a typical laptop or desktop. Lineage has some tradeoffs and not accessible on all devices, and Graphene needs even more specific, quite expensive hardware!

Did you have trouble setting up XFTP one? SMP was fine but XFTP seemed to have some error in the systemd settings provided in the manual.

I am suspicious of it because you pretty much cannot host a node. Well, you can - but you’d have to deposit an INSANE amount of money (like $2k or something). While Simplex, even though I do have a concern with its initial centralization by the power of default, is decidedly easy to selfhost.

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Signal is annoying to use if you don’t have a smartphone you can trust, since they do not allow registration from desktop. So either an Android VM or Signal-cli. But maybe it was just a one-off bug that the desktop client didn’t bind to signal-cli for me. Still, the fact that you need an unofficial command-line application just to register makes it not exactly user-friendly.

To be fair, pretty much all major XMPP clients have adopted OMEMO encryption, so doesn’t seem like much of an issue.

Effectively not encrypted, requires a smartphone, can be anal about bans, etc.

I don’t like physical copies. For convenience, I would be ripping it anyway, and then what? CDs and DVDs take up way too much space, then I would have to eiher throw a perfectly working disk away (which just feels bad) or bother selling it (which is not even guaranteed). I understand it if you’re into the collecting aspect, but I am personally not. If I was really set on paying for the media, I would rather go for a DRMless purchase. Or if it is not available, do it like with my Steam games - buy a DRMed copy and then pirate a DRMless one corresponding to it.

What settings presented most trouble to you, just curious?

Google and MS are the entities you’d definitely want to keep your data away from, no thanks. And Proton doesn’t work with normal mail clients, which is kind of a dealbreaker. I remember seeing a comparison chart somewhere with an assortment of other services.

What “someone else’s service” would you recommend?

I am hosting both XMPP and Matrix now, and my main concern with Matrix is storage. I am afraid it would eat up the very limited disk space I have on my VPS. Conduit offers no built-in way to clean files up, and media is stored in a weird way that makes it a PITA to see which ones can and cannot be deleted. I now know that neither the database files nor the media can be just deleted.

I sorta like the idea of a chatroom existing on more than one server, but that MUST have been opt-in or at the very least opt-out.