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Regarding users creating new accounts on phone setup:

Recently I encountered a user that had created a new Google account when switching to a new device... on their last 5 devices.

So when they switched to the latest one and called me to set up the phone, I had to wrangle the contacts, photos, cloud storage and whatnot from all of those accounts.

Another pain point for me (in the EU/Balkans) is the transfer of Whatsapp and Viber. For reasons unknown, the accounts, contacts, chats, downloaded data can't be transferred during device setup. The only way to transfer data to a new device is to create a cloud backup on the old phone, which requires creating a wapp/viber account and setting up the google drive backup (local backup to a file? lol no. Any other cloud service available? lol no). Of course, when dealing with a media-heavy user (lots of photos, lots of memes/videos from group chats that are automatically downloaded to the phone), often is the case that the cloud storage tied to the google account doesn't have enough space for the backups, because it is filled with the automatic google photos backup that nobody turns off. And the user usually doesn't want to pay for extra space on Google because they don't understand why or just plainly don't want to.

So yeah, the transfer process is slow and complicated and full of traps, but it also offers an insight in to how much the imaginary "average consumer" doesn't care about this stuff and just agrees to everything offered.


WhatsApp can do a local backup to /storage/emulated/0/Android/media/com.whatsapp

I have that set up, and Nextcloud syncs the folder to my server


Yes, but WhatsApp is very finiky about restoring that backup when you're setting up a new device.

Due to this, I've resorted to backing up to drive without any media and then after restore, sync the media back via other means.

It's also worth mentioning that when you sync with drive, it doesn't preserve the time stamps of devices


As usual, root and sshfs make this all a lot more bearable. Alas, no online-banking or digital health insurance services, lol.

While this will backup all the media files, the chats themselves are encrypted and the key to decrypt them is not included with that backup. The key is in the data partition which you will not be able to access without rooting your phone.

the WhatsApp chat transfer feature has worked for me many times https://faq.whatsapp.com/209942271778103/

for Viber I've only tried it via the backup on old phone and then restore that backup on the new phone


You don't have to use the cloud transfer with WhatsApp. You can simply transfer the backup files manually before you do the first logon. They're in the media folder.

With Viber I don't know, I've never used that.


> You don't have to use the cloud transfer with WhatsApp. You can simply transfer the backup files manually before you do the first logon. They're in the media folder.

This does not work anymore. The chats are encrypted and the key to decrypt them is not in the backup files.


I did it only a few weeks ago. They are indeed encrypted but it seems to retrieve the key from WhatsApp itself.

They wouldn't be much good as a backup if there was no way to read them of course.


I tried the exact same thing a few weeks ago with a de-googled phone and it did not work. I had to transfer the /data/data/com.whatsapp folder as well via root access, then it restored the chats (the display of the old phone was dead and hence I couldn't initiate any kind of account transfer to a new phone).

Weird, for me it worked fine. I didn't need to transfer the root parts. Nor did I do anything else on the old phone. I just signed in on the new one with the backups in place.

I don't use Google services or an account either, though I do have Google play installed.


> Another pain point for me (in the EU/Balkans) is the transfer of Whatsapp and Viber.

Telegram, due to not being e2e encrypted, is trivial to transfer, a new login does it.


Yes but that's because the server has access to all your messages, they are not end to end encrypted.

It makes things a lot easier yes but you do give up a lot of privacy too.


The server, and plausibly at least one secret service. Telegram datacenters are located in Florida, Amsterdam and Singapure.. guess local jurisdiction applies.

I am 100% convinced that whatsapp has backdoors and so I might as well just use the convenient one.

I noticed that as well, I thought it was just a bug or a conflict because I used Smart Switch instead of a "built-in" Android tool.

OK, so Windows now collects even more data about user behaviour, without notifying the user.

That's what spyware does, right?


Anybody know of a self-hosted RSS reader that can remember different views for different folders?

I'm using Inoreader which does that - I have a folder that is displayed as titles only, and a different one that displays as "cards".

I've tried a few of the more famous self-hosted ones, but none of them have that feature. I know that a keyboard shortcut can be used to change views, but my early-morning doomscrolling brain doesn't want to think about that.


I just installed a copy of 25H2 on a laptop with a previously saved Professional licence.

You can just choose to create a "work or school account" and then leave the domain name empty.


Thanks!

I wonder how much of this is Microsoft trying to create recurring profits from the base (Home) sku, rather than that they care about local-user installations in any other circumstance.


Interesting, will give that a try next time. I guess I never looked because I had assumed that option made you connect to an existing domain.


I've used that workaround on literally dozens of installations in the last few years :)



Yep, thanks for clarifying.

So it's not such a good deal after all and it also means that a lot of regular people won't get those updates (because they either don't know how or can't be bothered to make an account).


And yet, you don't get an Outlook notification if you receive new mail that gets sorted in to a Inbox subfolder.

Because nobody would ever want that.


"Nothing has improved since". That's so funny.


What's the biggest thing that's improved? We have 4x the pixels, so we spend 4x the rendering time to draw everything with 4x as many pixels, when it works, and complain when it doesn't.

Would have been easier to stick with the pixel density we had.

Oh, and we have to wait a frame to see everything because of compositing that I still don't quite understand what it's supposed to do? Something something backing store?


GL-Inet Flint2, maybe?


Just got 2 of these a few days ago and am super happy with them. The firmware it comes with is essentially OpenWRT with a fancier UI so that means that you can use an OpenWRT sysupgrade image to flash it to OpenWRT with no issues. WiFi6 and Hardware Flow Offloading (HFO) are super nice features of this particular router. Downside is that it has 4 1G LAN ports and 2 2.5G (1 WAN, 1 WAN/LAN) ports, so you're kind of stuck with gigabit.


I use a flint2 as the router for my 2Gbs internet connection, a Wireguard VPN server and to provide network connectivity for devices in my garage which is where the router lives.

I use the 2.5Gbs WAN/LAN port to uplink it to a switch in my basement where all my cabling terminates and a small rack lives. This switch then provides a mixture of 2.5, 5 and 10Gbs ports.

The point being that the flint2 doesn’t limit me to 1Gbs.


This is another similar tool:

https://socialfixer.com/

It loads 10 posts at a time and filters out all of the junk. Then you have to manually load more posts.

It's really eye-opening when you load 10 posts and it filters out 9 of them.

But besides that, the thing that's really pushing me away from FB is the pure hate, agression and stupidity on display in the comments section of local groups. It hurts to see the levels people descend to when they can comment without any repercussions.


how someone with a banhammer hanging overhead behaves is nowhere near as valuable an indicator, compared to behaviour when there are no perceived consequences.

[the thing that's really pushing me away from FB is the pure hate, agression and stupidity on display in the comments section of local groups] -- you are seeing what lurks inside, and what degree of personal refraint exists.


actually, on NextDoor, the population is so limited that it's fairly productive to Mute/Block the hateful or dumb people ("excuse me, but please pick up after your dog.")

FB, of course, has billions of users so that doesn't work.


NextDoor where I live is overrun by advertisements for gutters and 1 day shower replacements.

Maybe I live in a boring area?


nextdoor wouldn't even onboard me, i sent a message with details to their team and they said they'd fix it for me... that was like 3 or 4 years ago. I had to define a new neighborhood, so maybe that's why?


Nobody stops anybody from making a antisocial network graph and use a bot to block out the sun..


omfg thank you so much. truly. it works with facebook container tabs too!


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