Technical Guides Overview

With so many options and conflicting information out there, it’s difficult to pick what devices, apps and providers to go with. It takes a lot of time and effort to look into everything and understand all the important concepts. The goal with these technical guides is to provide simple recommendations based on years of accumulated technical knowledge and experience, and back up the recommendations with relevant background knowledge and comparisons to popular alternatives.

It can also be challenging to switch to a different solution if it needs to be configured or used differently than what we’re used to. Commercial solutions often make it intentionally hard to switch to an alternative. These guides are also meant to provide an introduction to using the recommended solutions and help with a smooth transition.

Considerations

When we make recommendations, we consider freedom, privacy, security, transparency, ease-of-use, and public good among other things. We avoid companies with shady and abusive business practices, and an overt centralisation of power.

Some negative examples are:

• selling data,
• profiling,
• manipulating users,
• ecosystem lock-in.

Positive examples are:

• zero-knowledge and zero-trust systems,
• open-source software,
• using open protocols,
• distributed power structures.