Technically true, but FOSS isn’t “free” in the sense that someone is contributing labor to build and maintain the software. Free to use, but not free to make. I personally wouldn’t expect or shame a person for using FOSS without contributing. But if you make a profitable business off a FOSS project, it seems reasonable to expect some form of contribution back to the project - not because it is technically required, but because who better to sponsor a project than someone profiting from it?

If you can host thelounge on your LAN and access it over VPN on the go, it makes for a very nice IRC experience.

Otherwise, ssh (termux or whatever) to your irc host running irssi or weechat

I haven’t used either command, but based on what I see in the manual, rcd tells rclone to start listening for remote commands whereas rc is used to issue remote commands.

Try it out by going to a folder with some files and typing: rclone rcd .

That should open a tab in your web browser with a list of your files.

There are situations where being able to send commands to rclone remotely would be helpful, but I’m not sure that you need to do that in this case.

I’m far from an expert, but I don’t know of rclone doing versioning, or a continuous sync like syncthing. Also haven’t used proton, so take my thoughts with a grain of salt.

Stage 1 Run rclone config to set up the proton remote. rclone config should take you through a wizard and will eventually ask you to authenticate somehow with the remote. Once that is done and saved, you’ll exit the rclone config wizard and be back at the command line.

Then you would run a test command like: rclone ls :

If it worked, you should see a list of files/folders on Proton. If not, you’ll have to go back to rclone config and edit the remote to fix whatever went wrong.

Stage 2

Test out copying the folders with a command something like: rclone copy localfile/folder remotename:remotepath

Do some testing to get the hang of the command, but it is pretty straightforward.

Stage 3

I don’t know how many files or how big the files are, but I assume not too many and not too big. I also don’t know which version of Linux you have, but I assume you have access to systemd, cron, or both.

You’ll make a basic shell script that runs the command you practiced in stage 2. Easy peasy, put it in a text file with a shebang at the beginning, make it executable, and give it a go. It should run exactly how it did when you typed the command out manually.

Finally, you will write a systemd timer or a cron/crontab entry to execute that script at some frequency.

So just to summarize:

1. Setup the proton remote in rclone using rclone config
2. Test out copying files to proton through rclone
3. Write a basic shell script that runs the command to copy files from the desired local folders to the desired proton folders.
4. Use one of the tools on Linux that lets you schedule the execution of scripts to automate running your copy to proton script as frequently as makes sense to you.

All three of those links are very outdated - I do not recommend trying to use any of them.

Can you be more specific about what you are trying to do exactly? I know rclone is confusing to get started on, in part because it does so many different things and the documentation requires some background/outside knowledge.

Other couple ideas to consider if job ambitions aren’t a major thought:

Nim-lang / Mummy. Neat in being high level like python but compiled and can do low level stuff. Small ecosystem but good interoperability with c and Python. Can also compile to js. Target embedded to web, very flexible.

Also php. Some people say modern php looks more like java. Either way, lots faster than it used to be. Wildly productive language for web stuff. Laravel or Symfony frameworks.

I guess, what I’d like to hear from you all is a way to jump back in as quickly as possible in such a way that it may be a career.

You might check job listings in your region/country to figure out what languages and technology stacks are in high demand, as where you are seems to matter a lot.

I use xmpp. It happens to be a great fit for a private family messaging service. Good interoperability between modern clients. I get that “nobody uses it” is hyperbole, but the internet is a big place and there is room for services without mass market appeal to thrive.

I don’t think it was the point of your post necessarily, but I did want to mention a couple of things that might make the Linux switch a little easier - if not for you, anybody else reading and agreeing.

First, distrobox (https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox) is a nifty frontend for podman/docker that I think makes it a little more usable/accessible without having a PhD in devops. Basically helper scripts that create a series of simple CLI commands that let you launch a new environment, enter the new (or old) environment, do stuff in the environment, exit the environment. Keeps your core system’s python separated from your development environment(s). Sacrifices the isolation qualities of containers in favor of usability, so probably ok for dev work on a desktop and not so much for production on a server.

Also, there are GUI applications for point and click management of distrobox - I use BoxBuddy, which is available as a Flatpak on Flathub, so again no interference with the core system provided it can run podman and flatpak.

Second, I know the php dev world figured out ways to abstract some docker complexity away with stuff like ddev (https://github.com/ddev/ddev) and lando (https://github.com/lando/lando). I wonder whether other languages have or will build that dev environment in a box abstraction on Docker/Podman/whatever.

Sad news. Here is a link to an impact study (PDF), which describes many (all?) of the projects that benefited from funding. But a few you may recognize include Lemmy, Kbin, and Mastodon:

https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/257ae66f-23c7-11ef-a195-01aa75ed71a1/language-en/format-PDF/source-324755022

Discourse is offering an AP plugin - not sure what it does: https://github.com/discourse/discourse-activity-pub

opensuse aeon (Linux). Immutable and designed to just work and keep working. https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Aeon

I did back of the envelope math a while back where if active users of large self-hosted communities (such as /r/selfhosted) put $5/month into donations to the most used self-hosted software projects, ~20 projects could get ~$75,000/year of income. Not enough to build a company around, but enough to live well on in many parts of the world as a sole developer or enough for a maintainer to pay for other developer contribution.

I think the open source community fails to organize around the fact that development and maintenance isn’t free, but that as a massive user group, it takes minimal contribution from each to make an impact. Can better messaging and “structure” break the free rider problem?

Thanks for sharing. Anything in particular that was broken, or just a bad experience overall? I thought about spinning it up for family group video chats, but I guess I can cross that one off the list.

I don’t have experience using it, but it is worth looking at BigBlueButton.

Tumbleweed is generally the place to be. I think it is easier to target for packagers and is the basis for most of the interesting stuff going on in the distro. The immutable versions (now named Aeon and Kalpa) use something like a stripped down Tumbleweed at the core, with applications mostly containerized. Think tight rolling core that has strong automated tests and rather safe, with applications mostly isolated in Flatpak to prevent library conflicts and such.

Did you check the opensuse community repos? Search here: https://software.opensuse.org/ - lots of stuff that isn’t included in the core / official.

Nothing gets solved overnight. I realize that f-droid isn’t the be all end all, but hey, be the change you want to see in the world. Maybe Aurora is a stop-gap, but maximize your use of f-droid alternatives and support the developers however you can. Be active in alternatives to the big-tech sites, like posting in beehaw communities.

Poaching something I posted on Reddit /r/selfhosted at the beginning of the year:

Back of the envelope math. Assuming 30,000 active users here on /r/selfhosted x $50/yr = $1.5M / 20 -> $75,000 per year. In other words, if /r/selfhosted gave $50 per person per year, “we” could contribute $1.5M to open source projects we use. Some projects probably wouldn’t know what to do with resources and/or don’t have the infrastructure in place to receive anything, so not a panacea. But for the well organized and developed projects?

It’s sort of wild if you think about it. There are probably 10-12 very popular self-hosted applications with a very long tail, but 20-25 probably captures a very healthy cross section of use. Not every project or developer can accept monetary donations or use them effectively. But $75,000/year is median household income in the US.

There are almost certainly many more open source software and app users than there are self-hosted people - I’d imagine the self-host people are a subset. So what if we add open source software and mobile apps to the collective pool we could financially contribute to - again, $50/year/per able user - maybe the number of supportable applications goes up to 50 or 80.

Leading the thought experiment to a logical conclusion - if 80 open source projects received $75,000/year in donation income (at a minor cost to those able to pay and none to the vast majority), enough in most parts of the world to support a person and possibly a family, we would have more amazing, privacy respecting options. It doesn’t necessarily solve everything, most people naturally free-ride, and organizing many small contributions at a massive scale isn’t a solved problem itself. But, my point is that users collectively have way more power than we realize.

One other thing I forgot to mention - transparency of the lead developer and service provider is overlooked, imo, as a criteria for picking a secure messaging client. That background information on jami wasn’t terribly clear to me when I looked a couple of years ago; it does seem better now.

It is a nice p2p, e2ee messaging app/service that doesn’t use phone numbers, e-mail or other domain addresses as an identifier. I think it used to be GNU Ring, and can be used as a SIP client.