A software developer and Linux nerd, living in Germany. I’m usually a chill dude but my online persona doesn’t always reflect my true personality. Take what I say with a grain of salt, I usually try to be nice and give good advice, though.
I’m into Free Software, selfhosting, microcontrollers and electronics, freedom, privacy and the usual stuff. And a few select other random things as well.
I wish my friends and family did the pre-screening of messages and their importance to me as well 😆 I get important messages and silly memes all mixed in the same group chats, so it’s impossible for me to tell whether I need to pick up my phone.
Background will do. I think even swiping it away is fine, as long as you don’t force-close it. Just pay attention there is some Play store or Aurora store doing automatic app updates. I skipped on the updates and once WhatsApp hadn’t been updated for several months, they closed the connection.
I run continuwuity and the mautrix-whatsapp bridge. It’s not 100% reliable, but close enough for me. Especially after I moved it from the NAS in my basement to a VPS in some datacenter. I occasionally had some issues with my ISP doing maintenance, a power outage at home… I let WhatsApp run on my kitchen tablet 24/7 so it keeps that 14 day timer running. To my knowledge that’s unavoidable unless you switch WhatsApp Business or something.
And I like Continuwuity way better than Synapse and the ridiculous amount of resources it uses to forward text messages.
But yeah, silently dropping the connection isn’t great at all. I think the only proper solution is to nag people into using a different messenger. Signal is relatively straightforward to use, made for average people and comes with the same functionality as WhatsApp.
From what I read on the news, they in fact caught some people by looking at other Flock cameras. Be careful anyway, while doing illegal things. And don’t brag about it or tell your friends.