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  • Need help with Contacts syncing and De-Googling/Proton Mail

Tryptamine That was actually very helpful. For some unknown reason, Proton Mail only has that Contacts icon in the sidebar, which I hid a very long time ago and forgot existed, so I thought there was no interface to add or edit contacts. Very bad UX design, in my opinion. I will explore this option further, as well as evaluate other people's suggestions, thanks!

      1e2j6 You are most welcome! I just found out about it last week, I thought "Proton must, have something for contacts," so I searched Startpage for "Proton Contacts" and lo and behold...

      Proton Contacts!

        1e2j6 Yes, I always use a VPN. Also - I am careful not to put anything "important" on my Nextcloud server. A person could argue that my contacts list on the server could expose information about my contacts if a bad guy did get into the Nextcloud server. But I only put down information about each contact that can already readily be found on places like Whitepages. And - among my contacts, I'm the only one who cares about privacy, I know these people, I love them, but I know how careless they are, I'm certain they already handed over all their contact info to Facebook or Tik Tok or wherever.

          Tryptamine Yes, I very much like having my own Nextcloud server.

          Having said that, I repeat, I am not a tech person, I just followed some simple instructions for installing Nextcloud and how to maintain it, very easy. Maybe a network admin would faint dead if he came to my house, but I think I did everything correctly. I also used another old computer to set up within my LAN a simplistic media server using Jellyfin and mStream, and used yet another old computer I got for free as a Kodi box.

          On the other hand, unlike Kip from "Naptoleon Dynamite", I do not love technology, my feeling is that I want to spend as little time fussing over it as possible, I just want it to work and be my slave to make my life easier. Consequently, I've never been able to justify running my own email server, it seemed to me it would consume too many evenings out of my week. I'm on the fence about setting up my own xmpp server, not sure yet......

          P.S.: I think it'd be very interesting to have a convo with you IRL about how you settled on your user name.

            dln949 hey, thanks for that! Saves me searching Startpage later!

            I do love tweaking and messing with technology, that's why I'm having loads of fun modifying and rebuilding GrapheneOS over and over. I'm really not the best at coding, used to be a lot better, in elementary school of all times if you can believe it! Won 2nd place at regional computer programming competition back then, before computer games ate up the next 12 years of my life, and kids most of the rest...

            Once you set some stuff up, servers should work for you, not be work so much to maintain. There will certainly be security and software updates, that's essential for any healthy system, but that and it will be good! I need to be able to remote into it using RDP or SSH, since I need it for torrent downloading and seeding, hence the RAID5 array (random array of independent disks). 3+ drives for RAID5, the size equivalency of one is used not for storage, but for "parity," error correcting code that can be used to rebuild the entirety of the data on one disk if it fails for any reason! Reads from the array are also 3-4X faster, depending on the # of disks.

            I don't think I'll do email either. Proton is too awesome! Torrents, media server, and it came with a huge Geforce RTX 1080, older card but its massive! I'll use its CUDA cores to help trascode my many lossless audio files from 44.4khz to 384khz or 768khz! May, and its a very big may, improve sound quality and reduce subtle artifacts. That's at least what everyone on r/audiophile claims!

            Yeah, search my username on a privacy-respecting search engine, and you'll get the gist of why I chose it! Sacred medicine, and I'll say no more! My other online nickname is "Phenethylamine," much less common. If you ever see that anywhere its probably me!

              dln949 oh yeah, make sure you install a firewall on your server, something like Uncomplicated Firewall. Easy as this:

              sudo apt install ufw gufw

              gufw is a graphical front end. Deny all incoming, and add exemptions for any programs you have that need it. That way your systems aren't wide open!

                  I got an old mini PC flashed StartOS, inatalled nextcloud, installed Davx5 on my pixel, contacts, photos and notes now sync.

                  StartOS has an easy guide.

                  10 months later

                  kallekruse Does Decsync CC still work for you? For me it did, but since a few months it looks like it doesn't anymore...