Continue using a custom ROM.

If more brands start locking down their devices I’ll have a conundrum, and it’ll start being about antique hunting. More apps requiring an “approved” OS would also do it, but geopolitics will stop that from going too far in the near future.

I’m using AOSP, which is kind of Google-derivative, but I’ve gotten off of everything else. Geopolitics seems like it will get in the way of overbearing US monopolies pretty soon here, too.

Maybe, maybe not. Periods of hardware and software lockdown have ended before.

A hard fork off of Android seems like the easier path to me if it doesn’t. Sure, they can break compatibility, but it will take a while for that to catch up with us, and in the meanwhile we can use apps and infrastructure that already exists. And Fairphone, at the very least, seems likely to continue being receptive to whatever ROM you want.

No? Even if you forget about AOSP, which exists and is great, F-Droid could register as a dev. It seems to be a principled stance they’re taking not to.

If you’re on AOSP, Google can’t affect you this way. You just need a portal to find APKs.

Well, I’m already running a custom ROM.

Non-Android Linux has a mobile software ecosystem problem as of last I checked.

So what app store should one move to, in that case?

Big projects like Tor actually use GitLab, as well, which is a vote of confidence. Some of these other ones don’t have the same obvious maturity.

I mean, I like a browsable GUI where I can look at a project in more or less detail, and without actually spending disk space.

Maybe you could vapour-smooth it.

Ah yes, the old Scunthorp problem.

Incredibly based.

Stealing boats should not be considered a crime against humanity.

FOSS is nice in that it’s not going to turn around and do something malicious. Pirated proprietary software both can and has a stronger-than-usual motive to.

Man, another really cool GNU project I hadn’t heard of. I should subscribe to a mailing list or something.

As I understand it, ActivityPub-compliance basically requires that a vote is tied to an actor. Although, they could have made a dummy actor do it. Maybe they were worried about stopping vote manipulation?

Yep. All the funding they’ve already put into it will stay put. You can’t uncode FOSS.

You can also take an intermediate approach, actually. Usually I can tell from just the developer docs or whitepapers if something has a way of producing the guarantees it claims.

Look, you either check for yourself, or trust people who have. The only other option amounts to building your own parallel reality.

Go look at the code, then.

Yes it does. You have a little cake next to your username, kind of the same way as on old Reddit.

There is also the consideration that ATPro has a community that’s both larger and less technical, so it would be harder to move them here than the other way around. I’m thinking the direction to go might be ActivityPub servers that can route things between ATPro personal data stores, but obviously I’m still learning.