When I read “privacy nightmare”, I think of a system collecting or revealing information without the user’s knowledge. As I understand BeReal, the user understands exactly what information they’re sharing, and with whom. That said, I’m puzzled by why anyone would want to participate on either side.

Here are some things I might be doing in any random time window in which such an app might prompt me to share a selfie:

• Eating food, usually not interesting food foodie friends would like to see
• Walking, usually somewhere pretty boring
• Sitting on the toilet
• Writing code at my computer (often code someone is paying me to write and wouldn’t like included in a social media post)
• Picking dandelions to feed to the goslings at the park

I don’t want to share any of those activities with my friends. If we’re catching up on life in person, I’m not going to talk about any of that. If any of my friends do want to see those moments, I’d find it weird and voyeuristic.

The interesting moment I do want to share, and people might actually want to see is the close encounter with the wild gosling taking the dandelion leaf from me.

it’s light on AI

Good. I have yet to see a preloaded AI feature on a phone that I want to use. The one I actually want is correctly deciding of I want to be disturbed with a given notification.

Federation doesn’t inherently require large amounts of memory. Fundamentally, it’s a matter of selecting a list of unique servers (likely tens, maybe hundreds) from a larger set of followers (likely hundreds, maybe thousands) and sending an HTTP request to each when there’s a new post. There’s a speed/size tradeoff for how many to send in parallel, but it’s not a resource-intensive operation.

Growth beyond a few tens of megabytes was a bug in Writefreely, which is a likely-suitable option several comments here recommended.

I’d put it farther removed from the technical side than that; dreadbeef is thinking like a manager. OP might be better off paying a third party $3/month to handle the details and host a heavyweight, full-featured blog for them, but that’s not what they asked for.

This is selfhosted, which I think implies a desire to self-host things even if it might seem a wiser use of resources to do something else.

I’m thinking like a programmer about what a basic blog has to do and the computing resources necessary to accomplish it. Software that needs more than a few tens of megabytes to accomplish that is not lightweight regardless of its merits.

This comment seems to be arguing that one should not demand blog software be lightweight because there’s inexpensive hosting for something heavyweight. That’s a fine position to take, I guess, but OP did ask for lightweight options.

It wants a gigabyte of RAM. Maybe that passes for lightweight in 2025, but given the fundamental things a blog has to do, I’d probably put the cutoff at less than a tenth that amount.

It makes my phone just as secure or insecure as my PC. I’m good with that.

If I was at higher risk of being directly targeted for attacks, I’d probably rethink that.

I insist on having root on principle; if I don’t, the device isn’t really mine.

In a practical sense though, ACCA is probably my biggest use case for it. I could work around most everything else.

Thanks for your lists. It’s hard to find mobile games that offer fun and a fair deal.

See also https://nobsgames.stavros.io/android/

Many of these are paid, but they’re one-time payments and usually a reasonable price.

The article only tests whether the batteries get hot. High electrical loads, both charge and discharge can also degrade batteries directly.

I’ve been setting limits with ACCA for years on my Pixel 4A because its battery is difficult to replace. I didn’t expect to keep it for five years, but there isn’t a new phone I would like better.

My standard limit is 60% charge and 500mA charge rate. Sometimes I increase the limit to 80% or the charge rate to 1000mA for convenience. I rarely allow 100% or the full 3000mA charge rate, and it’s set to pause charging in response to temperature.

While it’s essential for keeping devices safe, it can sometimes interfere with third-party app installations.

That’s… kind of biased language. I can’t keep my device safe without Google playing sysadmin for me?

Total Webhosting Solutions

I’ve been with Porkbun since Gandi got acquired. No complaints.

A larger phone is nicer to sit down and use with both hands, and while that is a primary use case for many people, it isn’t for me. I want my phone to emphasize portability and one-handed use.

I think there’s a viable market niche for a small phone, bi but I wonder if small phone customers might be unprofitable for other reasons.

Same here, though it really doesn’t fit my vision of a small phone. I still see a screen over 5" as large and 6" as extra-large.

I’m not surprised that small phones aren’t a big market segment, but I am surprised there’s not a single maker trying to dominate that niche.

Sony used to, as the article mentions. I suspect their sales were low in large part because their prices weren’t competitive. Some other niche player could easily have that market, especially if they did a little better on the value proposition. Alternately, Samsung launched 29 phones in 2024 or 2025; it’s surprising that they don’t include a single small model to address a market segment that, while not the largest, seems very devoted to that preference.

My best guess is that we’re an unprofitable segment for other reasons. I, for one am not going to regularly buy new phones just because they’re new. I’m also not going to use any bundled bloatware; I’ll change defaults; I won’t subscribe to many, if any services; I’ll block ads aggressively. I’ll even try to pay developers for apps outside of the built-in store, though that’s rarely possible. Anybody who sells me a phone is probably not going to make any profit from me other than the margin on the purchase price, and while I’m willing to pay a little extra for the phone I want (5" screen, headphone jack, unlockable bootloader), I’ll balk at an extreme premium.

The risk with anything involving a defective lithium-ion battery is fire/explosion.

Zero. It seems like software is increasingly expecting to be deployed in a container though, so that probably won’t last forever.

I’ve been using Maddy for about a year. It’s easy to set up and has been trouble free.