If you don’t mind going full back-to-basics, you can do this with standard command-line tools and no cloud server. Contrary to popular wisdom, a server is not necessary to sync files between a computer and a mobile device.

I use ssh and unison over wifi hotspot, no cable required. Works fine though it does require a button to be pressed. It doesn’t sync constantly in the background. Personally, after many years of doing that, I decided that it was an anti-feature.

Seafile is not FOSS, as I understand it. But I tried it anyway, since I also found Nextcloud bloated.

In the end I went back to the purest strategy of all: peer-to-peer. My files are synced between devices over the local network using ssh, rsync and unison and never touch an internet server.

What should they be doing instead? Begging for donations? I do agree in general, tho. Seems they should at least be squirreling away some (or most) of that money into a foundation, because they’re obviously going to need it one day.

Yes, bloat and mission creep is going to be an issue with any big non-profit. But maybe that’s also their advantage: any organization that becomes focused on sustaining itself is going to provide decent long-term stability. I guess it’s a bit like a state.

Specifically, the model should be the Wikimedia Foundation. That is, a non-profit organization with lots of stakeholders and slow procedures to guarantee accountability, and lots of resources to guarantee it won’t go away. This is the pragmatic least-bad solution to the problem of centralization on the internet.

So, biometrics, master password, and USB key - 3 whole options and 3 things I personally will never be letting near Android. Unwarranted caution, no doubt.

Not bothered about the potential for keyloggers or even OS-level snooping on what is presumably your privacy-free Android device? Personally I would never type the master password into anything other than a computer running a FOSS stack that I control, but perhaps that is excessive caution.

Your last two predictions are far-fetched in their cynicism. If it gets to that point, the laws will be irrelevant anyway. As it stands today, the migrants are far from the dregs of their own societies. With a bit more enforcement and coordination the boats would stop coming. Presumably the numbers will rise but the genuinely desperate climate refugees of the future will always be going to the first nearby country where they are safe, not halfway round the world to the place with the best economic prospects. Not claiming that any of this is fair, but then the tribalism that you mention is also what makes the cohesion of our societies. People will always resist being overrun from the outside, and that will not make them fascist.

Kotor is on the Adriatic.

Firefox desktop. It’s like a meta-app which enables you to get your news in just about any format on a big ergonomic screen while seated in a soft and comfortable chair.

If Fail2Ban is so important, why the h*** does it not come installed and enabled as standard?!

Security is the number-1 priority for any OS, and yet stock SSHD apparently does not have Fail2Ban-level security built in. My conclusion is that Fail2Ban cannot therefore be that vital.

Your frustration is warranted. I consider mapping to be the major unsolved problem in the FOSS universe. It’s certain my one, and I have much more limited aims than you. I just want my personal POIs on a map, in colored categories, with access to that map on desktop and mobile, read and write. I’ve gone with the serverless route, just syncing the two devices, but the Nextcloud method is not so different.

Well, it’s hard. Osmand is amazingly powerful, and apparently has the most advanced POI features of any Android app, but still there are catastrophic flaws. For example, in the GPX it marks up POI categories with its own bespoke GPX markup - totally invisible to desktop software (I had to write a Python script to add it to POIs created on desktop, just so that I can actually see their colors in Osmand). Next, syncing the GPX is made unnecessarily cumbersome by the fact that all the DB files and cached tiles are in the same file tree (I literally use an Android file sync tool to sync the GPX within Android to a place where it can be synced again with my desktop).

What a mess. Pretty sure I haven’t overlooked anything for my simple use case of POIs-on-a-map. It just seems not many people want to do this. Or perhaps they tried and then gave up.

Oh well. This rant is not much use to you, but please accept it as consolation.

But rsync can do this fine with --recursive --delete. The mirror will remain an exact replica.

ITT: lots of the usual paranoid overkill. If you do rsync with the --backup switch to a remote box or a VPS, that will cover all bases in the real world. The probability of losing anything is close to 0.

The more serious risk is discovering that something broke 3 weeks ago and the backups were not happening. So you need to make sure you are getting some kind of notification when the script completes successfully.

Fairly simple using Python locally with no need for a server: requests-html to get the website front page, then loop through the articles using feedgenerator to increment a feed object, then pipe it as XML to a file.

Obviously this is not simple at all but it does work. I have been consuming an RSS-free site by RSS every day for the last year. Provided you ensure theguid for each item is its URL, the RSS reader will keep track of what you have seen already, in order, which of course is the magic feature of RSS.