Librem One Concerns

All apps are free software.
We will publish a blog post soon that will explain everything and provide links to the source code.

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Thank you for the prompt response, I will make sure to include it in my postings to more closely reflect the current state of affairs

Might also be interesting to explain the reasoning behind providing a mastodon instance without all its features enabled (local timeline, direct messages, …) :slight_smile:

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I think many ppl are looking for a google alternative (a reason to leave). Will this mail product have a calendar option?

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I, too, have concerns about it. Maybe better classified as feedback.

When I saw the announcement of Librem One, I was excited. It is advertised as a bundle of services that respect and facilitate your privacy. Great!

Based on how things are presented at face value, the services appear to go together, indeed they are sold together. Beyond the common purpose of providing an online service that respects you and being sold as a bundle by one company, they do not seem to go together at all:

  • Purism makes laptops and a linux distro, yet there are no native Librem One (made by Purism for Librem laptops) apps at launch? Seems to be a big miss, as this is your only customer and market right now.
  • There are native apps for iOS and Android. Cool, but there is a gap on iOS, as the native client does not support PGP encryption.
  • The account management page is non-functional, so you cannot make changes to your account once registered.
  • These current shortcomings are not made apparent to anyone reviewing published info on Librem One until after making the purchase.

I love Purism, the mission, and so appreciate the great staff I have interacted with and those that make things tick behind the scenes, however I must say that this launch feels half-baked. Librem One looks wonderful as-advertised, but it seems that many of the integral pieces are missing, and those missing pieces have not been proactively communicated to customers and potential customers.


I know the cat is out of the bag, but I must ask, why not wait until all the pieces are in place and have a grand rollout? Like: Librem 5 shipments beginning today, new services to go with them (Librem One)!, and full native support for Librem laptops via software update available today! Librem One also compatible with iOS and Android*.

Something like that would be most impressive to not only your existing customers, but would surely make a massive splash in the news and bring loads of curious people looking, and happy with what they see when they get there.

As it is now, however, you’ll get some people coming to look, but many coming from the giants are sure to be disappointed once scratching deeper than the surface, for at least one of the reasons above.

To close on a positive note, that promo video is hilarious! :joy:

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In my case, I wanted to install Librem Chat Android. But Exodus Privacy informed me of 3 trackers :

1. Amplitude 
2. Google Firebase Analytics
3. Matomo (Piwik) 

I don’t understand, it can’t be a simple mistake. What does Google & Amplitude have to do with your chat application?

I trust Purism precisely not to feed the databases of the GAFAs, the famous “Free as Freedom” ethics.

Now that the damage is done, how can I trust Purism again on everything else? What other applications / OS sends metrics to Google, Amplitude & Co?

Amplitude’s slogan says it all:

“See how Amplitude helps you understand your users, rapidly release better product experiences, and grow your business.”

Why do you want to understand us? What business will we expand to you if you’re not supposed to sell our data? Besides, why do we have to collect metrics on end-users?

With all due respect, thank you for your feedback.

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You’re not wrong.
Who wouldn’t love an awe-inspiring launch?
OTOH, it’s not shabby at all, and I’ve witnessed worse. I’m still smirking at the Win98 presentation.

Other perspective: They were hoping to announce this in December, then February. Possibly thought, no matter how long they postpone it, it will have some edges. Release early, release often. As it is marketed as a crowd funding, minor hiccups should almost be expected. Now they have 60 days to fix the most obvious flaws. Also, it looks like one day in, they could already pay an additional employee, supporting further growth.

Indeed, hilarious ad video :sunglasses:

@prog-amateur, I’d assume it’s in upstream and has been forgotten? Embarrassing, but human. Assuming they intentionally put it there and hoped nobody would notice seems less likely to me. According to the wording of Exodus, it’s even possible the trackers were disabled quickly, but not removed and thus trigger the code analysis.

I agree with you. As a technical user and enthusiast, I can look past my disappointment and forward to what I’m sure will eventually be a satisfactory experience with the services.

What I am getting at is that they are trying to build a company wit products and services that people reliant on the giant’s products would realistically move to. The vast majority of those people need things to simply work, and these services do not.

For us, this is still a big step in the right direction. For the masses, this is probobly something advertised as game changing, yet wholly disappointing once you sign up.

As an experiment, I sent my dad and a friend to the Librem One announcement and talked it up with the points on the landing page. They are not technical people, but they are concerned with privacy. They told me it sounded cool, would check it out. In short, neither of them got what they thought they were (based on what they could read preregistration) once on the other side of the account registration.

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I agree, there is a lesson that Purism seems to have a hard time learning, even though people constantly give as feedback: Don’t only do the marketing-y stuff, also add technical facts in an easy-to-understand way, and don’t hide it in the fine-print behind the third link.

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Puri.sm is simply doing it what we all need and wanted for long time. Thank you for all.

To Librem One: At first it was unclear to me that it is a crowd funding campaign. I was wondering why there was a deadline. I think you should write that explicitly on the official page. In general we need more information. Here are questions that came to my mind. Maybe some of the answers should be written on the official page.

  1. What kind of crowd funding campaign this is.

  2. What is the current state of the offered services?

  3. What will happen if there are not enough backers when the deadline is reached?

  4. What will happen if there are enough backers when the deadline is reached?

  5. Are free account users counted as backers?

  6. Is there benefit to order now i compared to order later?

  7. Is there a benefit from ordering a free account now and upgrade later compared to order full service now?

  8. What is behind Librem One Chat? Matrix? XMPP? Which apps? Which infrastructure?

  9. What is behind Librem One VPN?

  10. What is behind Librem One Social? Which Apps? Which Infrastructure?

  11. Where is Librem One hosted? If in USA: Isn’t that a problem because of national security letters?

  12. Will it be possible to use Librem One Email together with an own domain? With catch all addresses? And with arbitrary number of mail addresses? I give every correspontent (service or person) an individual mail address to communicate with me. This way I can see who does not handle my email address responsibly.

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:+1:

I have plans to do the same - but it is a lot of work to change over a large number of existing services.

I didn’t get that impression since it’s the services they are selling, but I guess others might see it differently.

Are you referring to a Librem One account manager or something, or developing their own chat, email, social etc. apps for the desktop?

That’s not good if it’s true, hopefully they fix it quickly. But I do agree with @Caliga, I don’t think they would include those intentionally. It would hurt their business when people found out. An official response might be helpful though.

That was priceless :ok_hand:

It was great! :grin:

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Agreed, the marketing-y stuff is addressing non-tech-related people to convince them, “hey, we do not exploit you and protect your data”, which is great in all aspects when proven true. Also to be able to get non-tech people on board.
Currently the majority of attracted kind of customers might be the privacy and freedom aware techies. I like specs and facts more than a fancy drawing noting “warp-drive-goes-here”. Just my 2 Cents.
I am also concerned by the home order television - like time limit and unclear consequences what happens if the goal is not reached within that time limit.
Still I‘m in and want to give it a try :wink:

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I think that’s a non-issue. Read the risk paragraph and the next one.
The goal is so low it should be reached 50 days before the campaign ends.
The purpose of the campaign is to spread the word, get many on board early, and possibly reach the first stretch goal, but even more than that show the road map.

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I understand that they are selling the services, however the model everyone in the mainstream is used to purchasing from the giants is the buy our service, use our app model. This is great from a usability standpoint most of the time, as the apps tend to just work as one would expect. Apple services and apps are a great example of this (with some exceptions along the way).

The way Librem One is presented on the landing page currently, it seems that the model is what the giants are offering: services and apps together. This is only sort-of true, as you have to seek out the apps, and do a lot of manual configuration. There is no SSO, service-wide 2FA, etc.

This is why I said it would have been better to wait to get it right for a grand launch, something that would blow the non-technical people out of the water and make them see this is a true, viable alternative to the giants. These days, you don’t need to be a techie to be privacy-minded. All kinds of people are waking up to the fact that their devices are information sponges, and the tech services are brokers, among other things. Just what are they to do? There are no alternatives, aside from going back to a basic phone, paper planners, and individual use-case specific devices (point-n-shoot camera, stand alone older GPS unit, etc).

***edit:
Part of my struggle here, I think, is that I am the person I describe above: i went to a basic phone, dedicated devices, bought a Librem, etc. And then I see the announcement for Librem One, got excited, and then found the service at this point doesn’t do anything for me that I do not already have set up (I already have and am happy with another VPN and encrypted email provider, don’t care to use social media, and have matrix). The excitement factor for me was thinking there would be app-front-ends that integrate well with the existing desktop (sign in via Settings > Internet Accounts (or wherever), and all your services are configured, ready to go).

Seeing what the goals are, it seems much of this will come in time. I shall sit tight :smiley:

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These are exactly my concerns as well. Is there any official statement about those?

I’d like to know as well if deleting not encrypted emails will be optional. Nice idea, but usually I’d like to keep mails for later reference or lookup. Not for critical information, but still. :slight_smile:

I Like the general idea a lot, but currently information is a bit spare compared to the advertisement efforts.

Hope to get some more insights here.

Ok, I see what you meant now. Since this is still in the crowd funding stage, I think things will improve in time.

That seems unlikely. The services are targeting ordinary users that don’t want to mess with stuff. It’s also about the unified experience in using one address for mail, chat & social, which would be needlessly complicated with other domains. There’s also little benefit in moving an existing address to this service. You can as well just use GPG on your existing mail.

That on the other hand would be very desirable and should be a feature request. It is well aligned with the privacy & freedom aspect. I recently learned that (surprisingly) Google has such a feature. You could just write my.name+randomfiltertag@librem.one.

Hi, I understand your points of view, but without wanting to be too aggressive, it’s a little too easy. If we listened to Facebook and Google, they also put trackers “unintentionally”.

In addition, there is still no clear official feedback from Purism as a result. Apart from several speechs praising the transparency of these applications and Purism, I have a factual approach and I see that:

So I think the least we can ask for as customers is a transparent feedback on this disturbing point.

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Well, you’re just making public waves in the community, needlessly making Purism look bad.
If you really care, you could’ve just used the official support/feedback channels (e.g. mail) and ask.
Or you could realize that such an inquiry just adds to their currently undoubtful high workload, go ahead and just create a defect report, and get your answer within 6 hours.
I did that for you.
You’re welcome.

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