I once managed to do this to a coworker of mine in person. I was in disbelief, and so were they. Once in a lifetime feeling

Uh, I'm out of the loop on this one. Why is the pondering my orb meme seeing a resurgence?

So a group of thieves is a business, huh

I don't. It's great as is

I will send this screenshot as a means to ask for help

It's always a Bowser with Nintendo

The original project was bought by a company known for injecting ads into their apps, so this fork was made by one of the original maintainers in order to keep it ad-free. This is just off the top of my head, so go look into the project if this interests you.

thoughts and prayers

--no-cap

Based Parenti. I've recently read him on Tibet and his writing style is striking.

Right in the beginning, the article mentions that inhaling secondhand smoke can be bad for cats.

I've been using it the past few months - since April, if memory serves me. I mostly interact with one contact, individually, and a small group with others.

There's definitely been a few hiccups. I use the default servers, and there's been times when they weren't reliable in the past, but that's been rare. The app itself is not really buggy, but it gives you options without really explaining them, regarding configuration of messaging servers and file transfer servers. You have to go and read the documentation, which is actually pretty good.

Regarding battery consumption, it's been very battery efficient for me, and this is considering I use the service to receive notifications instantly. This is on a degoogled Galaxy S8, so YMMV. Anyway, there's plans to use some implementation of UnifiedPush in the future, if I recall correctly?

The bad parts are not really a big deal, in my opinion. I've tried a few private messengers in the past, such as Jami, Briar, Signal and (even though this definition is controversial) Telegram, through Nekogram. SimpleX has been the best one so far.

One of the reasons is the feature set. It really tries to be a "mainstream" messaging app, with a sane default set of features. You can send messages, make groups, big and small (the biggest I've been in had some 400 members - it was the app's support and development group), send pictures, video, audio, use a command line client and, since last week, try out the desktop GUI client. I don't remember if this last one had other releases, but I tried the AppImage, on Linux. It's okay, if a bit slow.

Also, there's no user ID and the messages can be routed through Tor, and I think they are by default. Do your research on this, as I'm not too sure, but the way they manage not having a user ID is that they usage message queues on each server, and each is particular to a group or connection between contacts. So you don't have an ID, people can't search you, and it's only you that can give out a link to connect to you. Such a link can be revoked and regenerated at any time, so it's a platform that is inherently immune to spam.

Regarding the servers, there is the possibility to host your own. Even though I have a small personal server, which serves as a backup for my files and some other small stuff, I have not tried setting up a SimpleX server because my communication with the app is vital and I don't have the budget to build a trusty server just yet, so I can't make a review of self-hosting a server. Still, it's good that the option is there.

Anyway, what I like most about SimpleX is the steady pace of development. As I said, I've been using it for just a few months, but a lot has changed already - it's gone from version 4.something to 5.2. The file transfer, which was slow when I first used the app, has been through a whole redesign, in terms of the protocol used, and they've created what they call XFTP, which I think stands for simpleX File Trasfer Protocol. You can self-host your servers with this protocol and they've completely changed the game, in terms of sending and receiving files. It makes me very hopeful for the project to see features being steadily implemented. A ton of small others have been added since I've been using the app, but that's the big one, in my opinion.

Phew. That was quite the write. I don't have to say this, but I am quite invested in this app and want to see it succeed, so I obviously recommend people try it. The problem is convincing regular people to "download one more app".