yestalgia

Thanks for the guidance! Proton relying on Google Play Services for push is already throwing a wrench in my profile plans. It will be fun to tinker with regardless and I'll figure something out.

Appreciate your reply!

My plan is to do one profile for now.

My concern with separate profiles was media playback stopping or being unavailable in the other profile.

I was under the impression that if an app was downloaded from the Play Store (not just banking apps) then it's basically reliant on Google services and should live in the same profile. Is that right? Or can Spotify and Whatsapp, for example, live in another profile from where Google services is installed and still get notifications and survive okay?

If that's the case and Google services only needs to be in a profile with banking apps, then that sure does change my mental model on how to set things up.

I hear you on "black and white" or "all or nothing" thinking.

But I literally don't even know what's guiding my decision to pick an app on Play Store vs F-Droid now.

Play Store = More trust but more tracking

Foss = Less trust but less tracking

Self-hosting has been really satisfying, but still, I'm moving my trust model to myself in how I've set things up as well as the apps that facilitate it.

It just feels like floundering in this pursuit if the concepts of privacy and security have so many different perspectives and gotchas.

I don't like this, but how can I explain to a family member that this is more than just hand-wavy bad and instead give a practical reason that would cause them to care?

People love syncthing but I spent about 20-30 min on setup and found it confusing once I got beyond 2 devices. There are a couple comments in this thread between me and someone else about different setup options with syncthing.

I have been relatively happy with folder sync pro and nextcloud though. It's worth noting that changes only instantly push when they're made on Android first. If you edit/add/remove a file that's in a synced folder from a computer, then folder sync pro on Android will simply use the sync interval that you set (I have mine at 15 min and have seen no battery hit, can set it down to 5 min). You can also just manually hit the sync button in FSP. But that was just one element that I was troubleshooting and thought sync was broken, but nope, that's just how it works depending on what device did the edit/add/remove.

How do you set up syncthing with a host/client configuration?

I planned on setting it up with 5 devices but as soon as I got to 3 devices I started having issues and didn't like the structure conceptually of "everything syncs to each other" vs having a "source of truth" with 2-way sync.

TBF my issues with syncthing were probably user error but still frustrated me enough that I bailed.

It really surprised me how many services I was relying on from Google when I really took stock. I've been weaning off for a few weeks and I expect the process to take some weeks/months still.

I just bought a Pixel to use GrapheneOS because I share your same opinion.

It took about 2 days of using nextcloud files across devices to experience unreliable syncing from Nextcloud on Android.

I installed folder sync pro on android and that has helped a lot, but it still irks me to use 2 tools when 1 should do the job.

A lot of my friction moving from 1PW to BW was due to TOTP (2fa codes) being stored inside 1PW.

So now that I have those codes in a different service than my password manager, I hope it's a less painful process as you describe.