Tusky is an open-source Mastodon client for Android. It is usable, beautiful, and completely free and open-source. It also, fortunately, supports a key feature to enable easy proxying of all of its traffic. While you can use it with any standard HTTP proxy you might have, you can also configure it to use the “localhost” proxy provided by Orbot: Tor for Android. Why would you want to do that? Orbot provides you free access to the global, volunteer-driven Tor onion-routed network, that protects your traffic from surveillance, interference, and censorship. It also stops your actual IP address from being visible to any server you connect to, including the Mastodon instance that you have configured Tusky with. Lastly, I happen to be the lead developer of Orbot, and I use and endorse this solution with all of my onion-ringed heart. If you are concerned about your access to Mastodon being tracked or blocked, or don’t fully trust the logging hygiene of your instances admin, then I suggest you enable HTTP proxy through Orbot. Just look in Tusky’s Preferences screen at the very bottom, and enable HTTP proxying to server “localhost” and port 8118. You also need to install Orbot and start it up (though you do NOT need to enable VPN mode for this).

https://nathan.freitas.net/2022/11/30/orboting-into-the-fediverse/

@nathan
Is Orbot in F-Droid repo or do people still have to enable the Guardian one?

@RyunoKi @nathan short answer, you still have to enable the GP Repo.

Just like the Fediverse, F-Droid is decentralized, and they want many different repos to flourish. Orbot is built in a secure way by the GP team, so we like to have our own repo where we can publish that APK.

@n8fr8
That's fair.

My comment was also meant to prevent „but I can't find it in F-Droid!“ kind of scenario.

@nathan

@RyunoKi Yes, for sure, and thank you for that. I am hoping we get better a better UXfor F-Droid the app, for enabling/adding multiple repos. Cough, cough @eighthave

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@n8fr8 @RyunoKi We will also be working on improving the repository management UX in F-Droid client, in the coming months, so feedback welcome.

@RyunoKi @n8fr8 I'm talking about the UX of finding, adding, and managing fdroid repos. That mostly means work on fdroidclient, but will also touch on web stuff.

@eighthave
@n8fr8 I'm working on web frontends professionally. I can't promise to contribute (especially not over a longer period of time) but if you need a second opinion feel free to contact me.

@RyunoKi @n8fr8 Thanks! Would you be interested in hacking together some kind of app listing UI based on the fdroid repo index? for example guardianproject.info/fdroid/re

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