this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2026
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Buy it for Life

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A place to share practical, durable and quality made products that are made to last, with an emphasis on upcycled and sustainable products!

Guidelines:

Things that are well-made and durable (even if they won't last a lifetime) are A-Okay!

Unlike that other BIFL place, Home-made and DIY items are encouraged here, as long as some form of instruction is included in the body of the post.

Videos links are not allowed as post titles, but you may use them in a text post.

A limited amount of self-promotion is accepted, IF the item you are selling aligns with this criteria:

  1. The item must be made with sustainable or recycled materials.
  2. If electronic in some way, the item must be open-source.
  3. The item must be user-serviceable (if applicable).
  4. You cannot be a large corporation.
  5. The post must be clearly marked with a [Self Promotion] tag in your title.

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housemate and I are sick of smartphone AI and spyware!! looking for cheap, refurbished cellphones from the 00s

  • the problem: all models we have found run on 2G, which is rapidly being phased out by all US carriers
  • desired features: basic call and text functionality, durability, physical buttons, fits in pocket
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[โ€“] skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The only downside is Pixel 10 support is coming via alternative methods from standard, as Google stopped shipping the binary blobs to run the hardware. Pixel 9 series may be the last to have truly native Graphene support. Graphene is looking into long-term solutions though, although last I heard they were looking at Qualcomm-based chipsets which is bad news on some level, as they're a US military contractor.

[โ€“] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I agree, that is a concern long-term.

I think the best path for the future is supporting Linux Phone alternatives like PostMarketOS so they become polished enough to daily for the average user. That likely won't be as secure as GrapheneOS with specialized hardware for quite a while, but should be good enough for most use cases, and would give us a platform that can't be rug pulled out from under us as we slowly improve it.