Hopfgeist

a future where all computing/devices are locked down

And who would mandate and control such a requirement? And how would it be enforced? And why?

The only reason Apple is locked down as it is, is that Apple as the only manufacturer has absolute control over architecture, hardware and software.

Being open will always be a unique selling point by at least some competing companies, so there will continue to be some, absent a dictatorship rigorously controlling the manufacture and sale of such devices. But I think not even China has managed to accomplish that. Open devices are an absolute necessity if you want research and technological progress. And if the industry needs it, some of it will inevitably become available to citizens, too.

Several do, including afraid.org, which I use. Other similar services were recently discussed here in this thread.

Ah, I see. I suspected it might be something like that. I've never tried that.

For large storage, ECC helps a lot for avoiding storage corruption. In combination with a redundant architecture in zfs it is almost bullet-proof. (Make no mistake, redundant storage is no substitute for backups! You still need those.)

One option is to use comparatively old server hardware. I have some pretty old stuff (around 10 years) that uses DDR3 RAM, which is dirt cheap, even with ECC (somewhere around 1 €/GB). And it will be fast enough by far for most applications. The downside is higher power consumption for the same performance. The Dell T320 I have with eight 3.5" SAS disks and 32 GB RAM uses some 140 W of power, to give you a ballpark figure.

What's your problem with DAVx^5? It's completely and permanently free and fully-featured on f-droid. Only the PlayStore version costs money. The authors don't want to make money, but motivate you to move away from Google infrastructure.

If you only need address/phone number sync, then nextcloud is probably overkill, but I use it, and it works great. Also for calendar sync and file storage.

(You don't need to put the community name in the title, especially not with "@", which signifies usernames. Communities are prefixed by "!".)

Yes, that's my workaround, too. Not a dealbreaker if it doesn't get priority. Just nice to have it in-app.

I don't really understand your issue. You cannot subscribe on an instance on which you don't have an account, so you always subscribe on your "home" instance. And for me, Liftoff does exactly the right thing. My account is on feddit.de, and I just subscribed to !liftoff@lemmy.world, and just to make sure, I had Liftoff list All posts, tapped on the community-link for "AI Generated images@sh.itjust.works", and then tapped "subscribe". Sure enough, I'm now subscribed to "AI Generated images@sh.itjust.works" on feddit.de. Witness the beauty of federation.

digital connection, where it's literally impossible for the cable to make a difference to the sound quality

Digital isn't magic. Lower-quality cables can very much make a difference on digital connections, including digital audio, although the effects are very different from analogue signal degradation. Granted, for the low bitrates required for audio you'd have to have a really bad cable/connector. As long as you are above a certain quality threshold, it doesn't matter, but with surface corrosion you may end up with marginal signal levels or degraded signal edges causing more bit errors. What that means depends on the type of protocol and the kind of error detection and error correction. Best case is a very good error correction, and nothing happens. But it may lead to slower transfer speeds due to retransmits, dropouts in real-time connections, or worse.

Less than perfect conductivity or mismatched impedance may also limit the bandwidth, cause reflections, and other nasty signal degradation. It is no joke that some cheap HDMI cables cannot reliably transmit 4k signals, and the higher-quality ones generally have gold-plated contact surfaces for good reason.

Nothing wrong with that, but that's about taste and aesthetics, not performance.

Currently: Liftoff, The Guardian, SimpleCalendar, BBC, Signal, Tusky, Fennec, FreeOTP+, Flightradar24, K9 Mail.

But it varies from day to day.

Gold-plating the connectors is actually one of the few things that does make sense. When new, they won't sound better, but they corrode less, which can, sometime in the future, make a difference, albeit very slight: surface oxidation can form a tiny capacitor. That said, I think you'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference to chrome-plated ones. But unlike lots of other esoteric "high-end" nonsense, this one has at least theoretical technical merit. And the micrometer-scale galvanic gold-plating isn't expensive, either.

Windy, overall, but especially for VFR forecasts, one of the few that will give cloud ceiling and visibility, and detailed winds (both on the ground and aloft, steady and gusts).

DWD Warnwetter for rain and warnings.