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LibreWolf is what FireFox was supposed to be: no VPN ads, no telemetry, no AI, uBlockOrigin built in. It's literally the latest FF release, but with the crap ripped out and decent privacy installed.
I'm still looking for a Librewolf or similar Android fork, has that ever made it close? I know the original project devs dont seem interested.
Have you checked IronFox?
I haven't, but I will now! :)
Go for it, Ironfox is brilliant.
Go for it. It's really good in terms of privacy
Can second IronFox, it's my daily.
Ironfox is pretty great for privacy, and tries to not break things, but they do have some configs you really have to dig for and already know about if something breaks.
I had the displeasure of finding out that the loopback and localhost was listed as a blocked domain for extensions, which is why an extension of mine couldn't connect to an app running on my phone. It was hard to find help for my issue, and I had to get lucky to find a solution for it (literally one person has my issue). Honesty, this extension gets broken every few months due to IronFox configs, due to JavaScript, WASM, SCP, or now this... I almost gave up on IronFox and went to Fennec 😅
They went too far in pursuing their foolish dogma and castrated a decent browser to the point where you don't want to work with it at all. For example, they removed the interface element that allows you to save passwords, even though the password manager is still there.
What are you even talking about? I use LibreWolf with the Mozilla password manager. It's a one click enable
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XMPP. It replaced WhatsApp in my family that signal failed to do.
I'm curious, I've never had the chance to really use Signal much, and I've never used an XMPP client before. What made you dislike Signal and use XMPP instead? I wish I could convince my iMessage loving mom to jump to anything else.
I had no issue with signal (except phone number verification) but according to my family members signal uses a lot of ram and battery. Non of them have Google play services. XMPP doesn't use that much resources and it's simple, no unnecessary bloat.
I prefer it because of resilience. A centralized service can be weakened, geoblocked or shut down by proposals like Chat Control. Decentralized protocols are much safer in such an environment, especially if there is variety in clients and servers.
Conversations is a good client for mobile. Pretty much on par with Whatsapp in ease of use.
Yep pretty lightweight and simple with no extra bloat
There is also signal-FOSS as an alternative to signal and Molly
Signal-FOSS
https://www.twinhelix.com/apps/signal-foss/
A fork of Signal for Android with proprietary Google binary blobs removed. Uses OpenStreetMap for maps and a websocket server connection, instead of Google Maps and Firebase Cloud Messaging.
add the repo to your app store to F-droid basic
https://fdroid.twinhelix.com/fdroid/repo/
The twinhelix repo is in the droidify and neostore repo list.
It's not letting me register. When I have my VPN turned off it can't conbect to servers, and when I have it turned on I get swamped with recaptchas and the veriification code doesn't send
I'm a bit confused. It says it connects to Signal's servers. Does this mean if I use Molly, I can still talk to people who are only using Signal?
yes, you can still use signal, molly and signal-foss. I have signal on my desktop and some of my family have molly and some signal-Foss.
The signal servers are primarily hosted on AWS with redundancies on Azure or Google Cloud. Molly and Siganl-FOSS use these too.
The official Android app generally uses the proprietary Google Play Services, although it is designed to be able to work without them.
Hence we use the signal-FOSS and Molly on our phones that do not have any google services.
Like any AOSP rom, Lineage, there are no google play services.
Its the google firebase that manages push notifications that seems to be the main privacy issue.
MollySocket allows getting signal notifications via UnifiedPush, not google firebase,
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Immich!
Keeping personal photos off someone else's server and stopping google and apple from training their AI on your nudes.
CoMaps, formerly known as Organic Maps.
Not formerly known. CoMaps is different from Organic Maps. This is the same as saying “Librewolf, formerly known as Firefox”.
VeraCrypt, Clonezilla, Joplin, Futo voice and Futo keyboard, Sentry, Wasted, Untracker, WTMP app, Fossify app suite.
Futo Voice and Futo Keyboard are rad and getting better (Swipe needs more time in the oven). Ive used VeraCrypt for a while and dig it
I haven't ever found a better open source keyboard or voice type than futo. It really is that good. With so many languages. I'm unsure why some of them got downvoted but oh well. I'm sure there's a ton more to add that are privacy focused open source apps but those were off my head.
Unfortunately those tools are not open source, they are under some source-available proprietary license. That may be why they (rightfully) get downvoted.
You can use them if you like of course, but they should not be advertised as open source.
Matrix is good for communication.
I advise you to post any recommendations to the original post, I was just sharing it here so others can find it! I also wanna see those recs myself so that's the motive for posting this 😅
OnionShare
I recommend my python script, Tonto2.
What does Tonto2 do?
It keeps lists.
You can use lists to keep in touch with family, friends, and cow-orkers.
Tonto2 keeps four kinds of lists:
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You can use an address list to keep track of contacts' phone numbers, mailing addresses, and eMail addresses.
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You can use a calendar to remind you about events and appointments including date, time, and duration. You can add notes about finding the location and other prerequisites to attendance.
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You can keep separate passwords in a password list for every website you visit and every piece of gear you own.
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You can keep links to favorite websites in a bookmark list.
Additionally you can make a list of bibliographic entries for writing research papers and for saving well-formatted footnotes for Web sites, but this is an arcane topic that will probably not be of general interest.
The information in these lists is at your fingertips.
You own it, and you can keep it. You can share it piecemeal with other people and computers without having to trust anyone or any thing with the whole enchilada. This is the idea of Tonto2.
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Picocrypt, which is an encryption tool for files and folders. It's a 3MB application that utilizes XChaCha20 as its encryption algorithm. It isn't developed anymore, but it's well worth it regardless.
Neigsendoig, my producer, just started using it, learning how it works.
open keychain - foss to to track pgp keys and generate them
Okay, just curious, does anyone else have a bug preventing them from using Openkeychain? Whenever I try to confirm a key, it simply gets stuck at the "My Key:" selection drop-down. There's a 8 year old GitHub issue that was started and it never got solved...
And like, there's no alternatives for this app are there? It seems Thunderbird defaults to them.
EDIT: I've been trying to create a keypair from Open keychain and simply export the pair to my laptop to use it there but any key it generates is unable to be imported by both gpg and Thunderbird. It seems I'm not the only one having this issue, meanwhile the project seems to be no longer maintained. What do I do? Give up on using Thunderbird on mobile?
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Surrey for the tangent, that might be my favourite comic of all time. I think it's an incredibly valuable lesson menu pepper still and always will need to learn at some point in their lives
What??
Wow I did not proof read that at all
Sorry for the tangent, that might be my favourite comic of all time. I think it's an incredibly valuable lesson many people still and always will need to learn at some point in their lives
Florisboard. Android keyboard, doesn't have spell checking yet but I've been using it for years, you might not need autocorrect as much as you think! (Note for Samsung users: Samsung Keyboard keeps adding items to its clipboard history whether it's default or not. Clipboard history is also accessible through Edge Panels. Your passwords might end up and sit there for a long time... you can use adb to disable com.samsung.android.app.clipboardedge and com.samsung.clipboardsaveservice.)
Just to post an alternative (correct me if there is something wrong with the app) but I have been using Futo keyboard for a week now and I've been pleayed. Clipboard disabled by default, drag typing, local autocorrect that you can load any dictionary (as a file), can use local text or voice ML model that you have to download yourself (their site has a browser), customizable quick actions, smart key hitbox enlarging (increases key hitbox according to how likely it is to come next). It is free, but asks for a support of about 9€.
correct me if there is something wrong with the app
It's proprietary (source available non-commercial license)
I mean, should be legal to build it from source, just can't sell it. It doesn't use cloud services or remote servers, so that is a plus for privacy.
Oh shit, I'm doing this with my granddaughter! She's not 2 yet so I need to wait a bit but I'm doing it!
The best Portmaster (Windows, Linux) and InVizible Pro for Android and forks (LinageOS, /e/OS....), apart common sense (PEBCAK license)
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this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2025
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Privacy
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