Great app, though!

I’ve been following this phone for a while, it’s nice to see there is a market out there for this kind of thing. The BlackBerry-esque design does look quite cool, although if I were to use a minimalist smartphone myself I’d probably go for the Mudita Kompakt instead. It’s just a bit more practical for my lifestyle, with the much smaller body, normal on-screen keyboard and de-Googled OS. There’s also another newish one called the Bigme Hibreak Pro which is the most “normal” overall.

can this phone handle those situations too?

It can, the Minimal Phone is not a dumbphone, privacy-focused or even minimalist and that was a conscious choice by the company. It’s just a normal Android smartphone with an e-ink display and a physical keyboard (and a headphone jack). The “Minimal” in the name is referring more to minimalising the phone’s influence on your life, because the e-ink screen is a barrier to so many addictive activities like doom-scrolling and video playback. It is not minimal in features at all and is designed to be able to do all of the important real-world task stuff, should you need it to.

For YouTube I use grayjay for without an account, it works fine for me, and I really like it.

OP is switching to iPhone. Grayjay isn’t available on iOS.

I guess part of the reason I think about it quite a bit these days is because almost all of my friends who are my age and older have mostly stopped. The guys who haven’t are the ones who are still single, living by themselves with no responsibilities to anyone beyond their employer.

One guy I know has vlogged and blogged quite a lot about his experiences “quitting” video games. The realisation he came to was that gaming was holding him back in many other areas of his life, and that he had been reluctant to acknowledge this earlier in his life because he was scared about what that said about all the time he had sunk into video games instead of solving his problems. It’s not that severe for me, but I do wonder whether it’s a hobby I maintain out of laziness/fear of trying something new, rather than because I still love it.

people are talking about having to pick between privacy (GrapheneOS) and ethical manufacturing (Fairphone)

GrapheneOS is far from the only ROM that can improve the user’s privacy. Many other projects support Fairphone, and whilst they may not pass the Lemmy purity tests, they are objectively better in many ways than the default operating system. It frustrates me that people in the privacy space constantly frame decisions as binary trade-offs when in reality you can always take smaller steps to improve your privacy without giving up everything else you care about.

Also, I can’t remember if I mentioned this previously, but I bought a secondhand 2DS a couple of months ago so I’ve finally got around to starting Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask. The DS Layton games were some of my favourites but because I never owned a 2DS/3DS, or a portable device that could emulate them well, I have held off on playing them until now. Layton games are best played in a cosy space, like in bed or an armchair with a rug, with headphones on and the weather has been colder and wetter here recently which is perfect for this type of game!

Other than that, I haven’t had too much free time for gaming lately, and to be honest I haven’t really had the drive for it either. I am approaching my mid-30s now and sometimes wonder if I’m going to “grow out of” gaming as a main hobby at some point in the near future.

I’ll be interested to read your future updates about AI: The Somnium Files. I really like Kotaro Uchikoshi’s work, he has written some of my favourite visual novels previously including Ever 17 and 999. I’ll wait until you’re further in before I talk about The Somnium Files (I don’t want to spoil or influence anything for you).

That quote you pulled is exactly what I’m talking about. Lots of pearl clutching about low-hanging fruit like violent imagery and drugs, no mention of the longer-term impacts of being exposed to services that are literally designed to be addictive or the way our privacy has been eroded by companies like Meta and Google monopolising our lives. No one wants to go beyond the most absolutely basic, surface level examination. Of course these people fucked the solution when they never fully understood the problem in the first place.

Just that they went and decided on this nebulous age verification instead of actual privacy protection we’re sorely lacking in this country (online)

As much as I do support the basic premise of a social media ban for children, this was always my big concern about the way the debate unfolded in Australia. Everyone was so preoccupied with these hysterical child safety arguments around sex predators and violent imagery. The much larger and more important issues around privacy and childhood development (i.e. influence of addictive technology on developing brains and broader impacts on society of these problems becoming normalised and resolved within our culture) were often just background noise.

Lumo represents one of many investments Proton will be making before the end of the decade to ensure that Europe stays strong, independent, and technologically sovereign. Because of legal uncertainty around Swiss government proposals to introduce mass surveillance — proposals that have been outlawed in the EU — Proton is moving most of its physical infrastructure out of Switzerland. Lumo will be the first product to move.

This shift represents an investment of over €100 million into the EU proper. While we do not give up the fight for privacy in Switzerland (and will continue to fight proposals that we believe will be extremely damaging to the Swiss economy), Proton is also embracing Europe and helping to develop a sovereign EuroStack for the future of our home continent. Lumo is European, and proudly so, and here to serve everybody who cares about privacy and security worldwide.

Good stuff hidden at the bottom of the article.

Removed by mod

Of course it will have an effect. My point was that they have straight up admitted it won’t affect the “porn sick brain rotted pedo gamer fetishists” they are trying to claim this is a win over, because this group will just access the games elsewhere.

In general I agree, but my understanding is that the pirate streams of live sporting events were cracked down on quite hard. There was definitely a dip at one point where the high quality SopCast and Ace Stream broadcasts that had become very popular for competitions like the Premier League (e.g. Bloodzeed) disappeared quite suddenly and weren’t replaced with anything comparable.

I responded to it

Unfortunately you don’t seem to understand the meaning of the words “compared to”. If, as you admit:

Slow security updates are a problem, plaguing basically all of Android.

Then it is impossible for there to be something wrong with Fairphone security compared to the majority of competitors.

“All these porn sick brain rotted pedo gamer fetishists so desperate to get their hands on rape-my-little-sister incest games they’re now exchanging clues on how to find them so that they don’t all die overnight,” Collective Shout co-founder Melinda Tankard Reist tweeted on July 18th.

…so you admit your strategy was completely ineffectual?

I mean the point was: “there is nothing actually wrong with Fairphone devices from a security perspective compared to the majority of its competitors”

You really struggle with reading, don’t you?

Who is doing strawmen now? 🤡 How in the world did you get to that idea from “together they could create a fantastic device”.

“The increased userbase gives Graphene more leverage and in a just world big companies and countries would maybe rethink their approach to data collection.”

There are no issues but those that exist are not important?

I’m not sure if you just didn’t read my reply properly or if you’re engaging in bad faith here but you’ve just stitched the first sentence of a paragraph and half of the last sentence of a paragraph together as if they’re related when they clearly aren’t. One is referring to the non-existent issue (from Fairphone’s perspective as clearly stated) of lack of GrapheneOS support, in direct response to you. The other is referring to the perceived security issues with Fairphone devices referenced in the article, and this is clearly stated in the first half of the same sentence which you decided to cut for some reason.

Update speed is a major issue and Fairphone is not great at it either. Yeah, it is not the worst offender, but that does not mean that it is good.

Nice strawman but I never said it was good. Again, respond in full instead of cherrypicking half a sentence. “Slow” updates compared to a Pixel is obviously not a problem considering Google has a minority market share and many people do not even bother to update their phone regularly. It is a fringe issue that is irrelevant to most.

That being said, which other rom is on equal footing with Graphene?

It doesn’t matter whether they’re equal to GrapheneOS. Like I said, if you are new to this space and don’t know anything then you think you need GrapheneOS because an influencer told you “iTs tHe bEsT oNe” and you looked at a comparison chart where it had the most green rows in its column. In reality many of its unique features and differences are well beyond the requirements of most people simply looking to reduce the amount of information big tech holds on them. Threat modelling exists for a reason but unfortunately many people burn out and return to big tech because they listen to bad advice from morons instead of thinking for themselves.

These projects don’t need to be identical to each other, and in fact it’s actually very healthy for the ecosystem and movement if they have differing feature sets and goals. Your utopian dream of GrapheneOS having a market monopoly is a terrible idea because it assumes the people in control are mentally stable and that nothing will ever go wrong, which we already know is a completely unrealistic assumption to have because Micay exists and Google just made custom ROM development much harder for Pixels.

So? I’m aware that my hypothetical idea is not the reality. But what hinders it from becoming the reality? As far as I am aware the humans behind each organization have mouths and ears, no?

Fairphone has zero interest in GrapheneOS and vice versa. Pretending that the only hindrance to this fictional collaboration is a lack of communication is delusional.

Personally I also hope that Graphene and Fairphone talk with each other instead about each other, because together they could create a fantastic device.

This isn’t even an issue from Fairphone’s perspective. It’s devices are supported by every other privacy-based ROM out there and its primary focus is on shipping and supporting devices with “stock” Android. As I said above, there is nothing actually wrong with Fairphone devices from a security perspective compared to the majority of its competitors, and even those issues that do exist are fringe cases that consumers do not care about.

The only reason this discussion about “GrapheneOS on Fairphone” keeps resurfacing is because of the cult-like behaviour I described elsewhere in this thread, where GrapheneOS is so widely recommended without context that people new to this space think it is the only solution to stock Android’s privacy issues. So they keep pestering the GrapheneOS team, asking for something that has been resolutely denied on multiple occasions previously, provoking a response that inevitably gets recirculated on social media and run as content on “news” sites. And then we get comments lile yours that frame GrapheneOS on Fairphone as an achievable and realistic thing that could happen with better communication, even though neither party is interested in pursuing that.

Aside from /e/OS which was mentioned in the article, Fairphones are also typically supported by LineageOS, iodéOS and CalyxOS.