A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Beginning of January 1st 2024 this rule WILL be enforced. Posts that are not tagged will be warned and if not fixed within 24h then removed!
How digitally independent are you?
I keep seeing different versions of this and instead of posting spinoffs of it, why don't we have one central repository that we keep promoting and improving. This would make it easier and easier for normal people to adopt new and privacy conscious solutions.
Osmand is awesome, but Organic Maps is more GMaps like.
Thunderbird is just a mail app, not a mail provider.
I don’t think Thunderbird is a direct alternative to Gmail. The best alternative is to own your own domain name and use your own email server, but that’s really impractical for most people. At the very least, owning your own domain name that you use for your email is way better than relying on a service that locks you in with their own domain name.
It’s not super easy to set that up, but it’s easier than most people probably think it is. A service with imap support will let you take all your old email with you if you switch providers.
My own email service, Port87, doesn’t have custom domain support or imap, but I’m working to add both of those features. Any service you use should have both of those if you want to be independent.
I've never hosted anything outside my home. Aren't there services that are basically 3rd party Docker hosts for which you could run some kind of email container? Preferably not one of the big three, otherwise why leave Gmail?
Specifically email is not difficult to host because of the technical burdens but because of the black and whitelisting of the big players. Often your server IP address happens to be put on a black list without your fault and then you can write an email to Microsoft or Google and say 'pretty please remove my IP address from your blacklist' and they just don't answer because they're swamped with requests like that and they need to check each one manually or something and then suddenly you can't email to 80% of the email addresses in the world for months.
Yeah, you can rent a virtual host and set up an email server on it. You gotta make sure port 25 is unblocked, which sometimes requires payment (Azure charges for it). Otherwise, you’d wanna look for a specific email hosting provider. You also would need to make sure the public IP you get isn’t on any spam lists, which can be a huge pain in the butt.
On my service, I specifically don’t use any spam lists that you have to pay to get off of, but a lot of places do (like Apple iCloud).
Self hosting email is, unfortunately, a fucking nightmare because you have to jump through a million hoops to get your server off of all the spam filters it will automatically wind up on.
As someone who runs an email service, you are 1,000,000% right. I think I had literal nightmares about it.
KeepassXC for password management.
Good point, using that too and syncing my database with syncthing between all the devices.
Worth noting that with KeePassDX, there's a compatible mobile app.
Most things labeled "KeePass" use the same file standard.
Here is my list, 15 out of 17 (while 2 are not applicable because I don't use anything like that):
I'm not sure if DuckDuckGo and TMap count because they're both just alternatives but still from big tech.
Hmm, I wonder...does "my favourite pirate streaming service" count as avoiding big tech?
I just tried Stremio and found it to be hot garbage. I'll stick with torrents/Jellyfin.
Droid-fy is a material F-Droid client though. And it is better. DuckDuckGo is USA using Bing engine, i am still using it when unhappy with Qwant results though. They need to add more time filters.
Droid-fy is a material F-Droid client though. And it is better.
Completely agree, but I just swapped over to Obtainium and getting releases directly from Github. Highly recommend.
I used it only for apps that are not in any store. Pretty handy.
Never heard of Droid-fy, will check it out.
Actually this might make for a fun propaganda game: Set up a website where every person can mark, for each item on the list, whether they made the switch, so that in the end they receive a picture they can share on social media so as to engage in a low-key "competition" with their friends.
Just for the record, Immich is made by futo, an American organization.
You can self host it on your own hardware for free to keep your files being on American servers, but it IS an American product.
This isn't to shit on futo or immich btw, immich is amazing software and futo is a great org headed by Louis Rossman, the spearhead of the American side of the right to repair movement.
Edit for clarity: I mention this because of the EU flag in the image, not because this specific post is calling it that away from American products.
Haha, whoops, I've been using Futo Keyboard for month, (it's amazing!) not realizing that it's sponsored by the same company that also gives money to Immich, nice!
Hard agree on futo keyboard. The switch is a bit rough until it learns how you type but after it's had a chance to learn it's GOOD shit
Yo I didn't know that was Louis Rossman!
Why Linux Mint specifically, why not just Linux? Or if they want to pick a specific distro, why not Trisquel or another FSF-endorsed distro?
why not just Linux?
Choice paralysis is a real obstacle for casual users who don't have specific needs (e.g. anti-proprietary values) and don't want to know what a kernel or a binary blob is, we've even seen this with Lemmy and other Fediverse options. So giving a specific distro suggestion is effective for this, and then later enabling them to move to other distros if there's one more suited to them.
Linux Mint is generally well-received by beginner users, especially those moving from Windows which is similar enough to Cinnamon. Even if it's not the ideal distro, it's one which I believe casual users are less likely to reject. Hardware is more likely to 'just work', including graphics cards and non-free codecs. Non-free software readily appears in the app store, which is important if users are still dependent on them (e.g. their hobby group only uses Discord). While I personally believe in, support and create FOSS software, I don't see how FSF-endorsement is important to the target audience, and if it risks them complaining that their NVIDIA GPU is acting weird or they're having trouble installing proprietary tools they need for work, then I'd compromise and give them the smoothest reasonably-free option possible and allow them to decide to move to another distro later when they're more familiar with Linux and how easy it is to try out distros.
Librewolf is not European at all. It's just some custom configuration of FF, which is eminently from an USA Corp. If FF dies, Librewolf dies as well. That's anything but "independence". Same goes for Vivaldi (Chromium) and any other usable browser you may think.
Sure, that's technically true, but I think it's acceptable for this infographic's purpose.
Whatever. Not European, so the European flag has no reason to be there.
I was about to write a criticism of this infographic then I rechecked and its been updated and fixed my concerns since I last saw it. Good job!
Edit: Okay found some issues.
Thunderbird is american. Its run by mozilla, which is a california based non-profit. So still american not EU. But also its an email client, whereas gmail is an online email service provider. There are EU based email services that should be listed instead.
90% Whatsapp and Steam are hard to ditch
Just become a gaming hermit that only emulates PS3 games and you'll be fine.
Or migrating to GOG
There's also itch.io if you're feeling adventurous.
Now this one I can get behind!