Selfhosting Offsite is hard.
Accessing services via standard protocols like ssh/webdav and just pushing your encrypted blobs there is a good middle ground.
They can't control what you upload, and you can easily point your end-point somewhere else if you need to move.
There's a reason why OpenAI and Anthropic (and before them Google, Apple, Meta, etc.) were started in the US and not Europe. And let's not compare salaries we each get for similar work because that tends to make my European friends very sad.
Yes, and that reason is a big single market (and a huge military and 100 years of power play to back it up) - and yes, there's a lot the EU could to unify its market - but it's not "less regulations".
> compare salaries
Let's not even begin this trope prevalet on HN, those taxes are funding a working healthcare and public infrastructure in EU.
> and that reason is a big single market (and a huge military and 100 years of power play to back it up)
That certainly helps. You could also add talent concentration due to excellent universities and top-tier companies already being here. But the truth is that you can incorporate a business in less than a week here, employment is at-will, there are no unions or other such bullshit, taxes are low, the general way you deal with regulator is ask for forgiveness instead of ask for permission, etc.
Say I'm currently working on a project in the crypto or AI space. If I wanted to make it into a commercial product, do you think I'm gonna go to France or Germany? It might take me a few weeks just to get past the first layers of red-tape to get a business licence there. If I hire someone who turns out to be incompetent, I'm probably stuck with them until I gather enough evidence to justify firing. And I have to live in constant fear of the state deciding my business is illegal.
> funding a working healthcare
Btw the US healthcare system is the best in the world if you can afford it. Health insurance is usually provided through the employer. I can have an appointment with a doctor within days, emergency room wait time is on the order of minutes. Never had a problem with the quality of care.
I swear I have this same conversation every month, and I think it is repeated by others like a thousand times if one searches for it, but I think it's worth it. I see your position and arguments in x.com culture a lot.
> talent concentration, excellent universities and top-tier companies
This is all just a consequence of above. And note that talent in US historically was mostly gen 1-2-3 immigrants.
> incorporate a business in less than a week
This is one is important. EU strives for it, but I think the reasons lie in the different worldview, see below.
> no unions or other such bullshit
> taxes are low
> if I hire someone who turns out to be incompetent
> best healthcare
See, you purely view this topic as someone wanting to minmax gains, profit, effort. Yes, this is easier to do in the US right now.
What kind of world do you build with all this? What does it all lead to? I envision something like futuristic Mexico where a few lucky get in the top ~30% who can afford healthcare and education, and live in gated apartment communities, businesses are owned by the top 2%. The rest of the population works in gig jobs and farms (and are a nuisance, until automation makes them unneeded).
How much of the US popultion has realistic access to that "best healthcare"? Children, elderly, disabled?
If it were up to "free markets", there would be no 5 day workweek, if you were born with one arm you'd die in a ditch, and cartelling businesses would be free to exploit the population, their privacy, time and assets at their will (just click agree on our T&C).
Do you care about these issues? You must not, you're a businessman and want to do business. But the state certainly should. And I wouldn't live in a state which doesn't. This is what everyone in the EU gets with your taxes. It's far from great, varies per member country, but this is the general idea. And this is something that US tech industry people have a hard time to get, who just look at comp levels think money and enough hustle can solve anything for anyone.
I recommend you to travel and see other types of societies. But even the US itself will undergo a massive change in the next decade with how its old powers, influx of people and world economy grasp evaporates.
> I recommend you to travel and see other types of societies
I actually travel pretty often to Europe and have lived there for extended periods of time. I have family and hold the passport of an EU member state.
I'm going to try to be 100% fair: people in Europe are generally poor and they don't realize it. Salaries are very low, but the cost of living is almost equivalent. I am currently enjoying a quality of life that I don't think I could have built anywhere else in the world within a single generation. If I wasn't grinding constantly, I could afford to go on vacation pretty much anywhere on earth for a few weeks without thinking about how much I would be spending. If I stopped working tomorrow, I could coast on my savings for years without cutting any expense. I will be able to pay tutors and private schools for my children without hesitating. And I'm not saying this to brag, because it is frankly not that special. I'm nowhere near the private jet class. This is "middle class" here. Almost everyone who worked in this industry (Bay Area or NYC) for a few years could tell you something similar. Tesla and BMWs are not luxury cars, the parking lot of my building is filled with them. Everyone hates tipping culture, but we tip 20-25% because it's just a rounding error and it makes the servers happy so might as well. I'm not sure if "free healthcare" can really make up for this.
It is also great to be surrounded by people who are ambitious and really value performance. The US is one of the only places in the world where high performance is rewarded to this extent. For me, this is a huge factor, and I don't think I would have learned as much as I did in the last few years if I was anywhere else.
But sure, there are tradeoffs. When my wife gave birth, she got 3 months of paid maternity leave. 3 months is considered generous here and it is a benefit provided by her company. Not everyone gets even 3 months.
And I can't deny that every time I land in Europe I go through the "this is so beautiful, I should really move here" phase. It's nice to be able to walk around or take public transit and not need a car. It's nice to hang around in a nice park instead of a shopping mall.
If Europe is more your kind of vibe, I don't judge you. But don't judge me either for valuing other things.
> See, you purely view this topic as someone wanting to minmax gains, profit, effort
My position is more nuanced, but in general, I believe that technological progress is what increases the standard of living for everyone. Competitive free market capitalism, with all its flaws, is currently the best system we have to continue moving forward.
Almost everything requires a UI. There's just nothing faster than quick glances and taps. It's why voice assistants or hand-waving gesture controls never took over. Having an agent code all those - possibly very complex things - is just impossible without AGI. How would it even work?
- Would the agent go through current app user flows OpenClaw style? Wildly insecure, error-prone, expensive.
- Tapping in to some sort of third party APIs/MCPs. authed, metered, documented how and by which standard to be not abused and hacked?
The unhyped truth is that LLMs are just wildly more competent autocomplete, and there is no such disruption in sight. The status quo of developers and users mostly remains.
They are not as common in Germany as in France in my experience. I would rather prefer to visit a german castle than waiting for the Stau to disappear.
In Germany, there's a guideline for a minimum distance between such signs so that they still stand out. Though I have seen a few that were closer than the supposed minimum of 20 or 30 km or so.
Not true, at least not in this all encompassing clickbait sense. $25 buys you a hackable R36S with 4 core cpu, 1gb ram, runs Debian off dual microsd with dual usb-c for any peripherials, swappable battery, emulation perf up to PSX. There are many more cheap, capable options.
I'd say "retro console" in the linux handheld sense is the best value hobby gadget to buy for the HN crowd.
Cybersecurity compliance, but .xyz site built under a day to get something out fast to drum up engagement and "test the vibes on the idea". Makes one wonder what became of this industry.
You mean throw those billions, tens of thousands of man hours, shareholder attenton, industry power and mindshare to a mostly useless concept, just because he had the money? Why are those resources not better spent on 100+ startups and 100+ unique ideas that are immediately tested by the market?
Just because the end concept was useless doesn’t mean the individual pieces don’t have value. Meta’s loose wallet probably kickstarted the work of dozens of smaller companies in the hardware space whose work can be parlayed into other areas.
Considering other mega corps would either hoard the cash or increase dividends, the fact that any money went to engineers is a win. Saying the money would be better spent funding startups does not reflect any real possibility.
Jolla / Sailfish is a 13 year old project and through all this time they couldn't make a foothold, or even sustain some small motivated community around them. During this time:
- company folded and changed hand multiple times, including russian ownership
- the tablet scandal leaving users with lost funds
- closed source parts
- locked bootloader
- charging a $50 device reset fee
- not much change in Sailfish OS since ages
- buggy Android compatibility and near zero native devs, all jumped ship
At this point I think they are just one of the grifters preying on naive "EU first" supporters shoveling whatever they still have in a new casing.
I'd love the idea of a greenfield EU Linux mobile OS, but I don't think it should come from this company.
Realistically building a production quality database takes 10 years. Building a production quality game engine takes 10 years.
They're building a mobile operating system and the hardware it runs on; that's harder and a moving target.
How long do you think it takes to build a supply chain of hardware that doesn't suck (if it takes 2 years to get moving: you need to start with hardware specs for 2 years from now) and an operating system that doesn't suck when you're also trying to catch up to a major duopoly cranking out devices at an unfathomable volume, with more money than most nation states?
Your standard is "succeed against Google and Apple within 13 years on a shoestring budget with no volume discounts." How can any project clear that bar?
> Your standard is "succeed against Google and Apple within 13 years..."
Absolutely not. My standard is the many other AOSP-based ROMs communities and companies that were founded around them, having success within a few years - yes, they could lean on the ecosystem compatibility and didn't produce their own hardware, but maybe that's a more viable way to start?
"shoestring budget with no volume discounts" does not explain the points of criticism above.
AOSP is just a totally different destination, it's not a faster route to the same one.
Sailfish is spiritually MeeGo: actual Linux on the phone, not a custom skin on Google's foundations. Obviously it's faster to build a kit-car than a car factory, I don't see how that's a rebuttal, it's an entirely different conversation.
An AOSP fork on Qualcomm hardware isn't independence. Jolla are actually trying to build the factory.
The $50 fee and tablet scandal are fair hits- but fuck-ups don't make you a grifter, and we've forgiven larger players far worse.
I don't see the issue of using AOSP. You get to skip the many years that Sailfish OS will still need in user testing. You get to skip all the possible incompatibilities with Android apps through the compatibility layer. AOSP is also Linux on the phone. I guess you mean GNU/Linux on the phone, but AOSP now also has official support for a Linux VM (you want a VM because traditional desktop Linux security is not great). They are even adding support for running Wayland apps. With the recently-added desktop support, you can plug a phone into an external screen and you'll have a desktop with Android apps and Linux desktop apps.
I think the chance of Google completely closing AOSP is pretty small, AOSP being open maintains a power equilibrium between Google and other OEMs. Closing up AOSP carries the huge risk that Samsung and some other big OEMs will fork it and Google has essentially lost the whole market overnight. I am pretty sure this is why Samsung phones also have the Galaxy Store with a bunch of apps like Netflix in it. The Galaxy Store is Samsung's subtle message to Google saying: don't try to rein us in, we can cut you out.
That said, even if Google closes AOSP, forking it and maintaining it as an open project is going to be far less work than brining Sailfish OS to the level of polish, security, etc. of AOSP.
Why is AOSP a wrong path? Why would it be "tainted"? Any large enough entity can fork. Hundreds already did, successfully. Even China couldn't do otherwise - via Huawei they mutated it to HarmonyOS (becoming much different from its roots, and incompatible to it, structurally becoming superior in many ways). Why throw away 20 years of development and a sea of dev experience?
But even if you insist on a non-AOSP way: Supporting any other, more well regarded projects and initiatives? Random top of my head idea: motivate Fairphone (Denmark) to adopt some non-android OS like Ubuntu Touch?
Sailfish is more like GNU/Linux, that is the OS in this context. For Jolla that is less code to maintain themselves then what Google maintains in Android/Linux. Hard forking Android/Linux looks to be quite a big bite to chew on.
When millions of dollars support a feature, that feature beats others- even technically superior ones, on the basis of support and polish.
We’re all playing to the tune of what Google wants because Google has the power.
Imagine a world where theres no Linux because MacOS and Windows paid lip service to people using partially functional derivatives of their OS’s, they’d still push things like liquid ass and windows recall, and those features would be spidered in.
Then people would be saying “don’t use linux, you can just use WinCore” Even though using Wincore is aiding Windows commercial interests over those of the industry as a whole.
If a product meets all of the needs of their users that's a good thing. It is a good thing to reward commercial entities for providing value to their users.
How do you know that the product meets the needs of users? From the usage? Did you hear about duopolies and walled gardens? Did you hear about banks forcing people on the duopoly?
Famously, GNU/Linux solves practically all problems of normies and yet it's usage is 5%. It's not easy for them to install a new OS, and you can't buy preinstalled GNU/Linux in a store.
> but I don't think it should come from this company.
Could*, maybe than should, unless you believe that all those things will apply to the phone they plan to release in September. Otherwise I don't see the issue with a company keep trying until they get something right (or give up). Why not?
True, but I also wanted to signify that I find any user trust (eg as a result of this new marketing campaign) is misplaced and steals air from a better alternative.
You should instead check out Plasma Mobile devices. They're _very_ close to releasing something for daily use and the whole KDE stack on mobile has come a long way.
I have no idea about the state of ModemManager though, because that has been historically always painful to use.
I'm currently betting personally on a Hackberry Pi variant. It's a Wi-Fi only device, so doesn't have a SIM without a breakout/addon board though. But at least it's fully open source and not whatever SailfishOS is. To me, SailfishOS is the same kind of fail like the "ZTE Open" with FirefoxOS, which, contrary to its name, was not open at all.
> Is there any hope for using the responsive libadwaita programs from the Mobile Linux space?
Currently not, if I understand correctly. There are plans to update or rewrite the Wayland compositor. If all goes well it should support GTK programs and I assume libadwaita too.
on the other, I really, really loved my original jolla phone back in the day. I happily used it as my daily driver and only phone for 2 years. Until it had a hardware fault which I could no longer repair via the company.
> Jolla / Sailfish is a 13 year old project and through all this time they couldn't make a foothold, or even sustain some small motivated community around them.
Sure, but somehow RCS is viable in 2026. Old projects can come back!
This looks like a good faith project, and OP surely put in time (2y+) and effort. Yet I would have discouraged them to make such a project at this time. OP seems like a well meaning but young, at the start of their career. A proper modern messaging app takes a great technical effort (even while the core concept itself is extremely primitive and could be coded in 10m) and even with that in mind, for end-users it's not really about technology, but trust - on long, long term. And you can't gain that as a blank page dev with no open source karma (or posing as such to stay anonymous).
Putting in so much effort to chase the holy grail of a new concept of a messaging app is like a film student who wants to cram in all their ideas in life to make something epic in movie no. 1. There are some who can stroke genius on first try, but the current project doesn't strike me as such. Props for making a product that is coherent and looking useful on the surface level, but I wish you'd put efforts in something smaller in scope first (or contributing to something already existing) and gaining more of a foothold first before tackling a messaging project.
Respectfully, you don't know what you're talking about. you have no idea who I am and are projecting your opinions of me and my efforts on my project (mostly incorrect). A lot of it seems like an attempt to discredit the project.
Scrutiny is something I come across a lot in the cybersecurity space (as it should be). its encouraged to make sure ideas hold-up. Your pushback here lacks substance.
Links to the technical docs are provided in the post. Feel free to reach out for clarity on the details.
> blank page dev with no open source karma (or posing as such to stay anonymous)
The problem as I wrote is not technical. I'd use a video converter or a string parser - that are offline and "download once" - gladly from any OS project. For a chat app that I'd use long term to share private communications would require trust, more contributors, and some background info - not names or an address, but some About section and a sense that the whole thing doesn't rely on the motivations of a single person and that there is some mutual/community oversight.
Understandable concerns, but then we start to talk about my limitation as a solo developer on an unfunded side project.
> blank page dev with no open source karma
I dont want anyone to just "trust me bro". im mainly active on reddit. I ask for feedback on relevant subs. What you see on my app is the result of several iterations from feedback and my learnings. This is a recent post about how encryption is being used.
I discuss various details on reddit to seek feedback. Feedback on experimental code has always been hard to ask for even before AI slop and i get my fair share of criticism about my code.
I previously worked on a open source version of the project. I created docs and communicated a reasonable amount about the details. It would have been worth collaborating with if i could get some kind of open-source funding. Ive tried grants and donations platforms. for similar resons to you, no grant wants to support this project and nobody donates (completely understandable). In the age of AI, it looks like a weekend project. That version of the project looks like this: https://github.com/positive-intentions/chat
I leave that open source because it demonstrates some core concepts around my project that i cant see anywhere else (webapp, no registration/installation, browser-based signal protocol, etc)... but after how long i worked on it, it seems open source isnt sustainable. That leads me to the latest version linked in this post. its and improvement over the open-source version in every way.... but i try to be clear that its still far from finished, because there are a lot of things to address before promoting this as ready.
While its understandable youd like a project like this run by a team of experts, there are limitation in what i can do beyond open-sourcing and talking about it. Some of the grant applications rejected with reasons along the lines of me being a one-man-band. completely understandable, but experts are not going to hire themselves on this project.
My motivations on this project are simple. I want to create a secure messaging app with the aim for it to be able to support me. it is reasonably open source, but not 100% in order for me to remain competative. (im sure you can imagine what AI is capable of if i fully open source it). I think its works in a fairly unique way, and i think i sufficiently demonstrate it.
Other comments have links to more details, but in short: do not support this company.
It was to be expected that a lot of corps will want to milk the term "EU sovereignty" and good willed naive people who don't look inside the packaging.
You're probably responding because of the Jolla tablet :)
To be fair, the Jolla tablet was in 2015, more than 10 years ago. Most probably, many of the people working at Jolla are not the same as then. Also, if you read carefully all the announcements and communication from Jolla, you can easily see they have learned from that crowdfunding affair. This is not the same offer, not in a long mile.
That and the russian ties, the partially closed source OS, the locked bootloader, the $50 device reset fee, the cheap underpowered chinese chipset. The company was sold more than once between investment firms. Yet it presents itself like a happy independent open source collective.
The firm with partly russian ownership went bankrupt a couple of years ago. The russian fork of the software lives on as AuroraOS in their local market but the current Jolla has no ties to russia.
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