I need to air some grievances about librem.one

Services Librem One
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I really want to like librem.one. I really wanted to pay for it, but I am not so sure anymore.

chat.librem.one is down. I cannot log in anymore via any client and sending of messages with the one client that is still logged in, has stalled now for more than 12hours. OK, it is a weekend, and I grant you the rest, hopefully it will be up again and reliable starting on MOnday.

Webfinger is still not set up correctly on librem.one. I have reported this to the support channel a couple of weeks ago: (https://social.librem.one/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:spaetz@librem.one works, but https://librem.one/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:spaetz@librem.one does not, but it should be working). This prevents other instances from finding my user (e.g. when they enter spaetz@librem.one in a mastodon search field). Again, I have reported this WEEKS AGO. It is still broken.

As I don’t like to nag about free services, I tried to upgrade my free subscription. It is not possible to change it from free to basic 1.99 a month, so I tried to increase it to the full (nearly) 8/month package. It said, ok, and click here to pay. I click and get redirected to shop.puri.sm where it says: “This does not seem to be your order”. I effectively have no way of upgrading my free subscription to a paid one! So, I tried to cancel my free account, delete it and recreate it with a paid subscription. But that won’t work as it still has pending orders (which will now be open until doomsday!)

So, paying for the service did not work (and no, I will not reregister an account with a different nickname). The matrix server was unreliable when I tried (and I am willing to blame it on a temporary glitch). But webfinger still being broken, weeks after I notified the support channel, indicated half-assed server administration. If I want an unmaintained server I can easily rent a vserver for $1/month myself.

I was willing to pay for the service, but only if it reliably works, and you let me.

UPDATE; just checked my matrix history, I noted the wrong webfinger configuration on Mo, Jan 18 2021 in the #support channel of chat.puri.sm.

P.S: The lack of a public timeline on the social.librem.one instance makes the need to subscribe to a user all the more pronounced, and without a proper webfinger resolution, the @librem.one username is essentially worthless.

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I can search your user @spaetz@librem.one with no problems from mastodon.online. It was broken but I managed to trigger a fix a while ago. Just checked again and it still works.

But yes, Librem Social is too crippled for my taste, especially regarding about the silently discarding of direct messages (no feedback to the sender - it’s what I heard and not tested by me).

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Indeed, search seems to work now. I just rechecked, I was verifying that it was broken some time ago, but it seems indeed to be fixed now. That reduces my blood pressure somewhat :).

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I’ve had Librem one now for a while and now into my 2nd subscription. For me it is, and has nearly always been flakey. Initially I was able to lure most of my friends to Librem chat from things like whatsapp and signal. Then Purism had to do something with the system that really buggered it for all of my group. It didn’t work properly for months and despite numerous support emails they really had no solution and now I have only my wife and one other friend on it. The rest lost patience. To this day messages can take hours to deliver, some will not go at all only to be discovered (annoyingly) later to be still sitting there with something like “failed to send, resend all?” message. Its flakey. Oh yeh, I forgot the frequent "could not connect to server " one where the message sits there in blue font with an endless blue line back and forth at the top of the screen. Its flakey and unreliable.

Librem mail, again, also went awry at the same time. Lost my three friends who I invited with my sub. It doesn’t work reliably enough for me to use, but it works flawlessly for my wife. This is the only reason I keep up my sub.

I have asked elsewhere on this board to see if I can get a countermail invite for my own email (thought I’d take the opportunity to slip that in!)

I have been down the support road, and I’ve mentioned before that they initially respond quickly, but as their limited suggestions don’t work the latency in their responses increases to the point that they need to be poked. I don’t blame them, although I’m sure that they didn’t believe most of my complaints with them suggesting that my problems seemed to isolated. To me and my friends.

I am sure that many use the suite without a problem, but in my experience it is badly flawed and buggy.
I hang in there hoping it fixes itself.

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Just to add to my bitching about Librem Chat. It has not worked all day here for me or my group. Just a blue line going across across the top of the screen.

The Librem daemons must have read my post from this morning. Shits me.

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I’ve experienced similar problems but I attribute it to teething problems for a new(er) service.

They’ve gotten over the blacklistng problem (for the most part) that started in January.

Sometimes an email with attachment will transmit but not get put into the sent folder. Not sure if it is an IMAP problem or Thunderbird. (IMAP to me implies sending it and having it come back again, kind of inefficient vs POP3.) Or it could just be Thunderbird.

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Probably yes, but if that is a major problem for you then you can configure Thunderbird to put the sent copy in a local folder rather than in a folder on the IMAP account (typically the Sent folder). It depends on whether you need the “access from anywhere” functionality of IMAP and/or whether you are relying on the operator of the IMAP account to do your backups for you.

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Still happening:

There was a problem communicating with the homeserver, please try again later.
**Cannot reach homeserver**
Ensure you have a stable internet connection, or get in touch with the server admin

I can exclude the internet connection issue, and I have been in touch with the server admin. :crying_cat_face:

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Wow, you managed to get other people hooked to librem chat? I did not even try. Matrix and its clients seem slow and unwieldy to me.

As for email, it does work good for me, but I’ve seen others complaining it often ends in spam. This is why I’m still keeping my other provider’s subscription.

Also, librem social never worked for me on Android and to this day I don’t get what Librem One app actually does.

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I tested this and can confirm that direct messages seem to be silently discarded. I don’t notice that someone tried to contact me, and on the sender’s side as I understood it everything looks fine, I think there is no indication that the message was not delivered.

Is that a bug, or is it intended to work that way? Even if the feature is deliberately turned off for some reason, it seems bad to discard silently, would be better if the sender got notified that direct messages cannot be used. Or is there a reason why it should be like that? I’m a little worried that someone might have written a direct message to me and now thinks I am rude for not answering.

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I believe that might be a consequence of the lack of properly configured webfinger as described in my first post. If somebody sends a direct message to skalman@librem.one, it tries to look up the user at https://librem.one/.well-known/... However, as that does not point to the server (social.librem.one), there is no way the sender of the direct message can reach your account’s inbox.
Beware, this is only speculation on my point, but so far the best working theory I have :).

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For now it is a manual process, I manually refile everything to local subfolders by subject matter.

P.S. I couldn’t use a dot for my puri.sm folder, I had to make it an underscore.

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I used the Librem One app on my Android only for email. (And only to my IMAPped folders obviously.)