CopWatch used to be pretty active and has apps for iOS and Android, but I see they haven’t been updated in a couple of years.

Granted, you’re using a home setup. But you could still consider setting up the VPN on a central AP and repeating your hotspot through it to make everything going in and out of your network encrypted and more secure. None of your actual traffic (besides what your phone is emitting) will be in the clear, which is better than nothing.

Almost any router with VPN and repeater options will accomplish this if you don’t wanna root your phone. I’ve flashed OpenWRT on the equivalent of router potatoes over the years. It’s pretty straightforward.

Yeah sorry I don’t have experience with Graphene but a quick search seems to say root is very difficult with it. Maybe look into flashing a different custom ROM if you really need this.

One thing I’ve done quite a bit is use my travel router (I have a GL-Inet Slate but there are lots of options) to repeat my hotspot, then connect all my devices via the router. And set the VPN up on the router. This way everything going out over the hotspot is encrypted anyhow.

For my needs, I can power the Slate by plugging it into my laptop or even my phone via usb-c. It’s very portable and versatile. Ymmv.

You can (basically) only do this with a rooted phone. There are some permissions issues that prevent the hotspot network adapter from being shared over the VPN client otherwise. This article from Proton is just an ELI5 splainer, you can go deeper with some searches.

If you have root and/or a custom ROM already (which usually assumes root) it’s not that complicated.

NP! It’s a great app, the dev updates it really frequently and I’ve never had any functional issue with it. I keep meaning to drop onto their git issues board and make a couple of small quality of life suggestions for the UI/UX as I use it dozens of times per day for work (there are some processes that currently take 5 clicks/per that could be reduced to 1 or 2 max) but that is a very small and nice problem to have.

That was the same issue I had with SyncThing, it just seemed to conk out at weird times and I gave up on it (for that purpose). It’s great for centralizing a directory of files from one machine to another but I didn’t love it for keeping a single file up-to-date with changes coming from more than one point on the network.

Oh yeah sorry, I misunderstood. I think what you’re looking for is local (network) versioning which I’ve had trouble finding in the past as well. I had hoped SyncThing would do it but it doesn’t. Versioning is something a service like git does perfectly (i.e. notifies of and/or resolves conflicts in text files on the fly, seamlessly). When I was doing a lot of writing from different devices I set up a private repo on Github (and later Gitlab) and got my text editor to auto-sync-on-save to the repo (from any device) and it worked great. There are very likely self-hosted solutions that wouldn’t rely on the cloud for that, but for me it worked fine as private repos because nobody but me would ever see those drafts (in a perfect world… we all know microsoft has almost certainly trained their shitty A.I. on my terrible writing versions over those years on Github because they own that platform).

I know there are ways to get Git working locally, probably for this purpose, but I don’t know of any simple ones to suggest.

I use LocalSend between all my devices (work, personal, etc). Mac, Linux, Android, Winblows. All. It’s fast, effective, lightweight. FOSS.

You might like Commento which is FOSS. You can self-host it (or fire it onto a free or low cost cloud host), and fun. It’s more like a Lemmy/reddit format (comment up/down votes can be enabled) than masto but maybe you’ll enjoy it.

Users can comment anonymously or you can enable basic verification steps. Decent moderation for if spam bots find you. Etc.

ETA I used to host my instance on Heroku’s free tier and it was more than enough for what little traffic was coming to my site.

I use syncthing for personal and work, and it’s great. Having said that I’ve found it struggles with versioning i.e. editing a document from multiple devices.

Look into something like Standard Notes for cross platform markdown editing. It’s e2e encrypted, works great, the dev is very responsive. Ymmv but I really like it, have it on every device I own and use it daily.

I’ve also just used a private git repo for editing docs from multiple devices. Once you get it set up it’s effortless, and most ide’s are extremely fun to use as text editors.

Feels on that, I know it’s not a one liner. I suppose I asked here because I was looking for a possible open source/community made solution (several devs working on and refining it collectively). As it happens one of the other commenters linked to pretty much this type of solution i.e. Haven which looks dope AF and I’m a take it for a spin shortly.

Thank you. I’ll look it up!

Damn, thank you so much!

Idk… Lots of devs I work with write software for mobile devices all the time. I could’ve worded it better I guess: I’m not a dev. 🤷‍♀️