MentalEdge

so yeah it’s technically always voice-over-IP even if I use the cell network.

It’s not. GSM calls are definitely still a thing, and while VoLTE is becoming more and more common, it’s not universal.

Maybe?

Afaik wifi calling works the same as VoLTE, which afaik is just VoIP, but handled by your mobile provider, and integrated into your normal mobile plan, so it works with your phone number.

When both ends of a call have the service, the call is entirely VoIP, which is how it achieves the much nicer audio quality for these calls.

If you just completely disable the mobile radios (set your phone not to use any kind of connection from the sim settings, while still enabling the sim) and use wifi exclusively, then it should work as if you just have VoIP service?

Read further into the thread.

You are mistaken.

I know it’s about convenience. That still isn’t how whatsapp works.

Using WA you cannot be logged in on more than one device. If you do log in for real, the previous device stops working. All additional devices have to be linked to the first one, and they access the service through that one main device.

You can’t use secondary “linked” devices or sessions if the main device is off. Try it. Open whatsapp web, login, then turn off your phone. The web session will stop working until you turn the phone back on, because it doesn’t actually connect to WA, it connects to your phone. Only your phone is what is actually connected to WA servers.

All “linked” devices/clients/bridges work this way. All available whatsapp bridge software works by pretending to be an additional “device”, and as such suffers all the same limitations.

And Beeber doesn’t do anything special, their systems are based on matrix. In fact I’m literally running the exact same bridge software they do.

Edit: Something has changed. This used to be true. Somewhere along the years WA has significantly changed how their systems work. I can only assume they buffer activity for 14 days and somehow defer the synchronization of content with the main client, because all the same limitations of devices being subordinate to a main session apply.

The most mind-boggling is the alteration that multiple client devices are now allowed, but also not really.

And they still require that user history be monolithically stored by the user, on their MOBILE device. And the only way to have a backup is through their backup solution, and god-forbid you press the wrong button when setting up a new device, because not restoring when the one chance is given, means everything is gone forever.

The main reason I use whatsapp via a bridge, is to have my message history stored on a proper server, so I don’t have to do the restore backup BS whenever I switch devices. I just re-link the bridge and go.

How did that even work at all? All activity goes THROUGH the WA app. WhatsApp only allows one real client to be connected, all other clients (other devices with the app linked to the first device, bridges, whatsapp web sessions, etc. they all still go through your “main device”). If you turn your “main” phone with the whatsapp app off, for example, all others stop working.

Looking it up, the bridge connection expires without activity at least every fourteen days to keep your account active in general. As long as you allow the app to run (which it has to do anyway, because that’s how WA works) it’ll do that on it’s own I think, no need to open it every fourteen days. Or at least, I’ve never had to. My bridge connection is literally over a year old, and I’ve definitely gone months without opening the actual WA app in that time.

I run my own instance and bridges.

I use fluffychat on mobile. Though I also have element installed as fluffy doesn’t support all message types, and has some bugs despite the nicer (imo) UI.

As for the battery drain of element, that’s something you’ll have to look into yourself. One of my own qualms with matrix atm is that there’s no really excellent mobile client for it… It’s all kinda meh. There’s element which is feature complete but has a bunch of issues, or there’s stuff like fluffy, which is nicer, but not feature complete, and still has issues.

Ah. I guess you might remove some metrics or some such that way, but that’s not a very transparent way to achieve that unless you dig in personally.

Good sign.

Still worth trying a known good os install. If not a snapshot from earlier, some live iso sessions.

If the problem persists even there, it’ll indicate that your hardward is bowing out.

When was this?

I’ve been using WA through a matrix bridge over a year, and I don’t think I’ve opened the WA app since setting it up. I do have to keep it installed, and allow it to run in the background.

It, or my matrix app, doesn’t seem to significantly drain my battery more than normal.

Is the once every two weeks thing an old requirement? I’ve never needed to deal with something like that.

You tried updating, but do you have snapshots set up to roll back to a time you’re sure it was working?

No.

There is no public API (nor any efforts to reverse engineer the one used by the official app afaik). WA is also client to client encrypted, meaning all your messages are only ever stored in one “main” installation of the official app, as well as in a backup file that whatsapp will put on either your google or apple cloud storage.

All the alternative apps/bridges for interacting with WA use the Whatsapp Web API to talk to your main client, which in turn talks to WA. There is no way around using the main whatsapp app, everything else still has to be used through it.

“Private cloud” as if that isn’t an oxymoron.

Don’t forget that while they managed the PR better, apple “Intelligence” also has access to damn near everything on your devices.

I do this with a projector.

When the projector is off, it is not detected by my GPU. When it is on, it is.

I simply configured the display config while the projector was on, with disabled monitors.

When the projector is turned off, it disappears, which triggers the normal, no-projector config.

My monitors now go blank, and come back, depending on whether the projector is on.

When you wiggle the mouse on KDE, the cursor gets bigger so you can find it on big or multiple monitors.

This is a very, very bad idea.

SSDs are permanent flash storage, yes, but that doesn’t mean you can leave them unpowered for extended periods of time.

Without a refresh, electrons can and do leak out of the charge traps that store the ones and zeroes. Depending on the exact NAND used, the data could start going corrupt within a year or so.

HDDs suffer the same problem, though less so. They can go several years, possibly a decade, but you’d still be risking the data on the drive but letting it sit unpowered for an extended time.

For the “cold storage” approach you should really be using something that’s designed to retain data in such conditions, like optical media, or tape drives.

Like the other guy said, there’s no immediate need to delete the account. And someone else wont be able to pick the address up after you, if you do.

I’ll probably leave google eventually, as well, but I don’t intend to delete my account. The process of using google services less and less has been ongoing for years for me, and I will just use them less and less, until I no longer do at all.

Where email is concerned, I’ll just have whatever my new email is pull in my mail from gmail for a while, and as I receive email concerning various accounts to my gmail, that’s when I’ll go in and change them over to use my new address so the old inbox gets less and less mail.

Then, eventually, when I haven’t touched it for years, I might take the final step of actually deleting it. But probably not.

How the hell is someone elses data supposed to help identify your files?

If the data is encrypted, and the keys to decrypt it are gone, then so is the data.

Without the keys, the data may as well be all zeroes.

That’s not really how the comments on alternativeto work. They are relative.

If you got to spotifys page, it will list similar services, each with their own comments, and the comments under youtube music, for example, will be about how it compares to spotify.

So, to leave useful comments, you only have to know how a given piece of software compares to what you used before. You don’t comment on how a given thing compares to everything else, only to one thing at a time.

Then, as other people browse the alternatives, they can use those individual comparisons to navigate their way to what they need. Stuff like “this can’t replace that for this use-case, because reason, but it does this other stuff” is extremely useful when looking for something that does what you’re looking for.