Right - ran a search and got no results, so am asking directly
This thing any good? Anyone run it?
Use case: want to give my kid a SEVERELY locked down Moto E (2nd gen) as a Youtube music player device and a “message Daddy” app - strictly wifi / in house only.
The first thing is simple enough. The second thing is…interesting.
I had my local AI do some research and it spat out the above. I don’t think it’s quite right but It looks interesting. Any one use it / can comment? Failing that, can anyone recommend a simple WLAN messaging app that will run on Android 6 / lineageOS? I’m sure I can dig one up but if someone has one running, I’m all ears.
PS: I’m not looking at using a VPS for this…but the above did catch my attention as fairly normie friendly. Might be worth self hosting something like that…
I find it rather concerning that both of circlus’s GitHub repos are empty.
SimpleX and Briar are both pretty good for messengers that are only able to talk to people you know.
Yeah, I doubt anyone runs it, because if you follow the instructions and click on the link to the server code, it’s just missing. And the empty repository has been sitting there since May… Seems all “Circulus” is, is a shiny website with advertisement text.
Maybe delta chat could be the right thing? https://delta.chat/
It uses email technology to implement the secure chat
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Hey buddy this doesn’t look like a great service. It isn’t open source but claims to be, and appears to have only been around a couple of months.
A project with a lot of backing called Nextcloud could work for you. It has a service called Nextcloud Talk that you’ll be able to throw on their dumb phone and if you want to you can use it as an alternative to dropbox/onedrive and google docs.
edit: a benefit of nextcloud talk is that your kid won’t be able to add some random person or do anything too nefarious with it and if they did you’d be able to see everything
Yeah…this Circlus thing has a particular odor to it. Knew it was too good to be true but wanted to double check, as had not heard of it before. Thanks for confirming.
I think I will fork Simple LAN Chat and add what I want: https://github.com/nathanielxd/simple-lan-chat
It’s server-less, which is one less thing to host. Text chat already works. The main problems are broken image/file transfer (literally craps itself with anything > 5kb in testing) and no useful notifications. So I will fix those, then probably add offline message queuing. The codebase is small and simple enough (he said, ominously) and if I don’t scope creep, this should do the job nicely.
My kids are really into PictoCHAT on their DSes, so I’m thinking of it as something along those lines.
I want something that only works on the local WLAN, between vetted devices, and does not rely on Google accounts, FCM or other cloud middleware. I don’t allow them unlimited access to the net / social media, so am engineering in house solutions. The base app here already keeps communication on the LAN, and I will add the device-vetting part. It looks like it’s configured down to Android 5.1, so I can install it on old junkers without SIM cards, modern tablets, etc. That way the kids can play around with it (without doing something they shouldn’t), take it camping (hotspot) etc. I’ll need to reroll the Android APK. Could be a fun little project…
