IzzyOnDroid

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© Shiftphones

Like the well-known Fairphones, Shiftphones are modular devices. Right from the shop they ship with no bloat, just the minimal set of Google Apps are installed. And never was it easier to go Google-free: no bootloader unlocking or the like required, simply use the standard update feature to switch to the alternative version!

© William Theaker / Izzy

The previous article described how to create and run a simple F-Droid repo. Of course, with just text it looks a bit spartan – so let’s polish it up a bit with this article, and add graphics among other things.

© William Theaker / Izzy

No GUI, but more flexibility: fdroidserver is intended to run F-Droid repos. It’s used by F-Droid itself even to build apps from source, and also by IzzyOnDroid to just serve „collected apps“ using a setup variant called „simple binary repo“. This is easier to achieve than you might think – and this article shows you how to do it on a Debian based system.

© Metatrans Apps

With F-Droid, everybody can host their own repo: like the apps at F-Droid, the software is completely free and open source. Some enthusiast supporters already do so, also some developers. Read in this guest article how Metatrans Apps discovered this possibility for themselves, and what their experience was on the path.

© Richard Scott (CC)

Most apps ship with additional modules. Some of those are required for the functionality, others are not. This article will deal with the latter – and how to find out which of those might be used by an app.

You’ve probably heard that F-Droid is „permanently understaffed“ and could need some more „helping hands“ – but always thought it might be to complicated for you? While there are indeed some complicated tasks: there are also easy onces any enthusiastic user can perform. No development knowledge required. Got curious? This article shows some of my daily tasks.

Network Analysis
© Martin Grandjean
CC BY-SA

Mastodon and PeerTube are by far not the only „services” in the Fediverse. Decentralized services do exist even „in the outside“. To describe them all, would mean writing a multi-volume encyclopedia – this doesn’t fit into a Blog. Nevertheless, let’s take a little view „beyond our own noses“ – though you might find yourselves in familiar terrain here.

PeerTube Logo © Chocobozzz, AGPL-3

Annoyed by all those ads on YouTube – and by the „enforced Binge-Watching“ there? Sure you can substitute using Invidious and NewPipe to get around that. But that still leaves the content in Google’s hands. For free content there’s a better place: PeerTube. Also works with NewPipe now, btw.

Mastodon Logo © Jin Nguyen (Wikipedia)

Mastodon probably is the best-known service of the Fediverse. It is a Microblogging service often compared to Twitter (a comparison not covering all aspects, of course). How does Mastodon differ, where does it excel and how you can use it? This article should shed some light.

CC BY-SA; source: Wikipedia

What most mainstream „social networks“ have in common: they are proprietary, centralised, and commercialize their user’s data. You mustn’t think „that’s just the way it is“. The Fediverse shows there are other ways. Never heard of it? Read on!