chin123

Email is unencrypted by default anyway. Just encrypting your mailbox is not enough, because ultimately you are sending your email to someone else, and their mail server will have access to the email. For conversations where privacy is important, I would setup PGP or use another method of communication like Signal.

GMail has ads. It's free because you are the product, not the customer. Google's customers are the advertisers. The money has to come from somewhere.

Why do you need ads for this? I don't remember the last time I bought something because of an ad. You don't need to pay for professional opinions on everything. I wanted to buy a pair of headphones recently, and so I just scouted the various headphone discussion forums on the internet (head-fi, r/headphones etc) and there was a lot of high quality information and opinions and I was able to make an informed purchase while paying nothing extra. It is very rare that I'm looking for a product and I can't find recommendations this way, and even if that happens I can ask my friends. The best part is that they probably don't gain anything from you buying some product, and that increases my level of confidence on the veracity of their reviews and recommendations.

At this point I've pretty much trained myself to zone out when I see an ad because it is probably peddling some mediocre crap.

It may reduce the environmental issues, but now miners will just go from hoarding GPUs to hoarding SSDs.

I've seen a few WebRTC server implementations pop up recently but the only clients I have seen are web browsers. Does anyone know of any WebRTC client implementations apart from the browser? Or am I misunderstanding the WebRTC architecture completely?

Except, newpipe doesn't use the YouTube API. Similar to youtube-dl, it scrapes the YouTube webpage for all its functionality. The only way I can imagine YouTube can shut this down is by introducing DRM, at which point I hope people will boycott them anyway.

Why is having one less native app an upside? From my experience, mobile websites are much more cumbersome than native apps, especially in this case because NewPipe is so much better than the YouTube mobile website.

I've been using Matrix with Riot since 2016 (then called Vector). Rooms aren't encrypted by default, however you can turn it on with the toggle of a button. One drawback I've noticed is Riot uses a lot of battery on Android (this is probably due to me not using the GCM back end), and on Linux as well (this is probably due to it being an electron app). Sadly there is no other Matrix client which is as featureful as Riot (for example, most of the others don't have E2E support), and so we're kinda stuck with it.

I also tried setting up a matrix home server with synapse, however I couldn't get it to work with an nginx reverse proxy and let's encrypt, and decided to just settle with using the default home server with E2E enabled. Others have had more success with this however, so I must be doing something wrong.

The experience is pretty good, and my friends and I have tried the Slack, IRC and Telegram bridges and they seem to work pretty well (infact the telegram bridge was so fast that I thought my friend was using the native client when he was messaging me). Haven't tried WhatsApp yet, though.

I've also used matrix and riot to connect to large group chats on IRC and Matrix and overall its a more pleasant and user friendly experience than using IRC, especially on mobile.

Apart from not being encrypted by default, Telegram uses its own homegrown crypto instead of a tried and tested one for its secret chat feature. That itself is a red flag.