Thank you for taking the time to write this, LibRedirect is so much better!

Unfortunately, I think it just picks randomly. I have had times where it has redirected me to an instance that is down. That said, if you have an instance you know is stable, it does give you a drop-down to always redirect to a specific one.

For me, it’s many of the ones people have already said, plus:

• StreetPass (seriously cool - collects the mastodon profile of any website you visit where someone has set up the special link to their profile)
• Video Speed Controller (gives you fine-grained control over video speed, e.g. watching video at 2.6x speed)
• Privacy redirect (automatically redirects to various services, e.g. from Twitter to Nitter - can select a random instance each time)

Agreed, it’s licensed under the MPL, a “weak copyleft” license. Each file that is MPL must remain MPL, but other files in the same project can be permissive or even proprietary.

While I definitely think it’s better than a fully permissive license, it seems more permissive than the LGPL, which is the main license of WebKit and Blink. So I don’t feel it’s strong enough to stop it being co-opted.

I really wish there was a GPL-licensed rendering engine and browser, accepting community funding, with some momentum behind it.

I feel Ladybird have correctly identified the problem - that all major browsers and engines (including Firefox) get their primary source of funding from Google, and thus ads. And the donations and attention they’ve received show that there is real demand for an alternative.

But I think the permissive license they have chosen means history will repeat itself. KHTML being licensed under the LGPL made it easy for Google to co-opt, since it was so much easier to incorporate into a proprietary (or more permissively licensed) codebase.

There is Netsurf, but the rendering engine understandably and unfortunately lags behind the major ones. I just wish it was possible to gather support and momentum behind it to the same extent that Ladybird has achieved.

Different strokes for different folks! I’ve been fortunate enough that many of my family and friends have been happy enough to follow me.

But I don’t disagree with you, Signal has a much more recognisable brand and better user experience. These are things that we need to improve if we’re going to get anywhere near the level of adoption Signal has.

How I Got a Truly Anonymous XMPP Account:

• Open my client (e.g. Conversations, Monal, Dino)
• Pick a random server, username and password
• Click register

Sorry, it’s a cheap joke, but it still baffles me that Signal requires a phone number, so I felt I had to post it :)

Of course, this is not XMPP-specific either, just my protocol of choice, there are many other open alternatives that also offer such functionality.

I originally suggested Monal to my friend (who is quite into iOS and really appreciates a well designed application) and she found the same, but then she tried Siskin, and was happy enough to use it to this day.

Just for reference, here are my favourites on each platform.

Each support modern XMPP extensions, interoperate very nicely with each other, and (at least in my opinion) look good!

• Android: Conversations
• iOS: Siskin
• Windows & Linux: Dino
• Mac OS: Beagle IM
• Web: Converse JS

As a note of caution, I used Oracle’s free tier to run a personal Matrix server, and it got deleted without any advance warning after a few months. I migrated to another provider and haven’t had any issues for 2+ years now.