a private DNS server that only has records from your local services would at least prevent apps from reaching out as long as they aren’t smart enough to fall back to an IP address if DNS fails.

Yes, this. It’s important that your local DNS server does not even forward queries from the isolated subnet to external DNS, because these queries (and responses) can contain information. (“DNS tunneling”).

What will this mean for Lemmy instances? XMPP servers? Email servers?

What if a 15 year old runs their own personal Mastodon server? LoL this is gonna be yet another entertaining Australian government shitshow.

I think a lot of comments have missed that ntfy.sh does not use UnifiedPush, the ntfy server is a UnifiedPush provider and the ntfy app is a UnifiedPush distributor.

Regarding encryption of the push message, from https://unifiedpush.org/developers/spec/android/ :

Push message: This is an array of bytes (ByteArray) sent by the application server to the push server. The distributor sends this message to the end user application. It MUST be the raw POST data received by the push server (or the rewrite proxy if present). The message MUST be an encrypted content that follows RFC8291. Its size is between 1 and 4096 bytes (inclusive).

Aliexpress

Could go old school and build your own:

Page 66: https://www.worldradiohistory.com/AUSTRALIA/Electronics-Australia/EA-1992-07.pdf

Page 126: https://www.worldradiohistory.com/AUSTRALIA/ETI-Australia/90s/ETI-1990-01.pdf

That rules it out for me then. I like to use XMPP+OMEMO with about 4-5 clients which I can continue a conversation with at any time. Main mobile, tablet, desktop, other desktop, and backup mobile which is usually switched off. (Even if a device has been missing for too long and run out of OMEMO keys, the keys sync up again once I send a message with it.)

You have to trust the servers with your metadata, and that the servers have their inter-server communication locked down, but at least you can choose/operate servers.

Some clients are a bit flaky with their e2e encryption defaults or from a UI perspective it is easy to send an unencrypted message (in a new chat for example) before noticing that was how it was set.

There are a few XEPs the server needs which enable things like OMEMO, efficient mobile data/battery use, offline and multiple device deliverability, file transfers, etc. Audio/video calling has various requirements as I think xmpp only facilitates the setup of the call.

Munin feels a little old and crusty, but just works. Over 20 years old now.

XMPP lacks good clients and suffers from fragmentation of protocol standards implementation

• For Android: Conversations is excellent, also on F-Droid if you don’t want to use the Google store.
• For iOS/MacOS: Siskin or iOS/MacOS: Monal.
• For Linux/Windows: Gajim or Linux: Dino.

“Protocol fragmentation” is not a valid complaint about XMPP – it’s like complaining that ActivityPub is fragmented; but that’s not a problem: you use the services (Mastodon, Lemmy, Kbin, etc) built with it which suit your needs, mostly interacting with that sector of the federation (eg, Lemmy+Kbin), but get a little interoperability with other sectors as a bonus (eg, Lemmy+Mastodon).

🤔

Yeah, X11 forwarding is only fine on a campus wide network, maybe city-wide at most, if the wan is fast enough.

Sshfs would also be painful for operations processing a lot of data (grepping gigs of log files or even creating thumbnails of images to browse).

remote access

To be fair, X11 forwarding is a straightforward thing, bearing in mind any security/performance/administrative restrictions which may apply to your situation.

Alternatively, SSHFS can be used to mount a remote directory locally.

Most people¹, even in this very thread, clearly don’t […]

1. Signal shill-bot personas.

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

The footwear, or the logic gate arrangement?

If that’s the main problem then that’s easy to solve! Simply use a free public xmpp server.

I mention the self- and paid-hosting options because businesses tend to like having a sevice agreement backed by a contract, and may have additional specialised requirements not provided by free services (xmpp or otherwise).

XMPP. A business can self-host, there are public servers, or there are many businesses which offer customised xmpp hosting as a service.

I can be federated with other xmpp servers or be a locked-down work-only service, or federate with chosen other servers (such as a client company’s xmpp servers).