Some projects that kind of do that come to mind:

Beeper, which is a hosted Matrix server (probably Synapse) with bridges to other messengers, and a client (probably derived from Element?). But it’s all called Beeper to be more “normal”.

Snikket is a “rebranded” prosody XMPP server, Conversations client for Android and Siskin IM client for iOS. Also, all are Snikket, no scary abbreviations and different app names.

Average user does not care, as long as it works.

https://xkcd.com/2501/

So did “Amazon”… :/

The most obnoxious case of needy apps I witnessed was when I disabled Google Play Services on a OnePlus phone. Every default app (including Phone and SMS!) would spam notifications saying something like “Google Play not found, functionality is limited” every minute or two, while the real impact was minimal.

IMO not as good as The Circle. Although it follows one character, they move between so many departments, it reads more like a collection of short stories.

Did you read The Every yet? It’s a sequel, but instead of anti-privacy, it leans more into greenwashing, and how only the powerful corporations can save us from a climate disaster.

Welcome to Gemini!

There’s a widespread movement in design circles to reduce the contrast between text and background

This was the trend circa 2012 too, at least I recall Microsoft’s pages and software becoming less legible. Not sure if I got used to it, screens got better, or it went back to higher contrast.

.kkrieger for those who want to look it up

The best explanation I saw several years ago: Large tech companies drive change through competing individual teams and projects. So some manager pitched a half-assed idea, somehow convinced upper management to go with it, got developers to heroically implement it, and might have gotten some bonus for doing so. It doesn’t matter if there was no value as long as some decision maker thinks there is (or does not care, or numbers were fudged anyway).

It is literally change for the sake of change.

Stardew Valley has plenty of silly and funny moments to begin with. But the last patch added a “green rain” event, and during the first occurrence, all villagers are hiding inside, except Demetrius. This guy is just walking around in a full hazmat suit, collecting samples and babbling about mushrooms.

Got PineTime pre-tariffs (even though it took a while to ship to US)

Pretty neat piece of hardware, has everything that I want (notifications, time, weather, timer), InfiniTime OS is open source and was easy to read, build and flash (had to do so to add missing Cyrillic letters and a shortcut)

As long as your expectations are that of a microcontroller-powered device and not a supercomputer-on-your-wrist, it’s fantastic.

IMO Snikket (XMPP) is the easiest all-in-one solution with audio/video chat at the moment. Pretty good on resources too.

I currently host a Matrix Synapse server, but:

• Matrix seems to be expanding in the corporate / institutional direction, more services are expected for regular functionality
• Element X (upcoming client) breaks calls compatibility with old Element, now requiring Element Call. It’s kind of a mess, I presume this is to support group calls, but makes it a PITA to use currently.
• Even with small number of users, Synapse DB grows in size due to state_groups_state table, non-deletable users, and copying ALL data from other servers’ rooms (this one is by design but still…)

I ran prosody server and used Siskin IM as a client, it worked pretty well. But as others mentioned, since this is Apple, the client developer has to run a push server, no background processes and long-polling allowed. Some other XMPP clients (Secret Messenger I think) did not have that set up and do not have notifications.

Why? Programming language isn’t a natural language. In fact, I think not knowing English makes it easier, since you cannot attach any preconceived notions, assumptions, or word order to keywords. I learned some Pascal, Visual Basic and whatever GameMaker used at the time without being fluent in English.

Profanity for XMPP and gomuks for Matrix are both neat ncurses clients that work pretty well.

Looks like BM818 in Librem5 supports VoLTE, but might have issues with some networks.

PinePhone’s (and one of Mudita’s phone’s) EG25 modem technically supports VoLTE, but was very flaky for me (in a mid-low signal area)

FuriLabs (FLX1) seems to have VoLTE working.

Ubuntu Touch explicitly states that it does not support VoLTE.

Nice! Writing a similar converter was my first step when I set up my parallel site-capsule.

Love gemtext, it’s so simple yet pragmatic. (And there is just one version of it, unlike Markdown)

When I last used Dino (a few years back, on a PinePhone), I had to build it with notification sounds flag. Not sure if this is still the case, or if that is the same for calls.

./configure --enable-plugin=notification-sound

While looking for above, also found a GitHub issue with your problem

Osmin on PinePhone was… Tolerable. I’m just pleasantly surprised it worked okay with GPS being integrated into the modem.

Takes a long time to get a GPS fix (like old standalone GPS units), but it’s possible to provide A-GPS data to it.