Credit to https://www.reddit.com/user/lukakopajtic/
There might be some changes that could improve it further:
Remove BraveMaybe add Signal; It’s easier than Element, but it’s also centralized- Stop suggesting Linux Mint specifically
- Recommend Hosted Nextcloud
Add GrapheneOS- Maybe add Delta chat
Maybe remove BlueskyRemove Stremio and add Jellfyin (even though it’s selfhosted and not a direct equivalent)Add ente because Immich is selfhostedAdd auroraAdd SearxNG- Add SimpleX
- Add lichess
- Add pCloud
Any other suggestions?
Temporary improved version:
| From | To | Compromise |
|---|---|---|
| X, Threads | Mastodon | Bluesky |
| Pixelfed | ||
| YouTube | PeerTube | ReVanced (just blocks adds) |
| Lemmy | ||
| Netlix, Disney+ | 🔨 Jellyfin | |
| Google Meet, Zoom | Jitsi Meet | |
| Google Docs | Etherpad | |
| Google Search | 🔨 SearxNG | Kagi, Ecosia |
| Google Drive | Nextcloud | pCloud, filen, Proton Drive |
| Google Photos, iCloud | Immich | Ente |
| Google Chrome | Librewolf, Firefox | Ungoogled-chromium |
| All messaging apps | Element (matrix) | Signal |
| Google Home, Amazon Alexa | Home Assistant | |
| Play Store | F-droid, Aurora | |
| Google Android, iOS | LineageOS, GrapheneOS | |
| Windows, MacOS | Linux Mint |
🔨 = Self-Hosted only (requires running a server)
Don’t use Brave. It’s got a lot of privacy issues, even compared to the Mozilla foundation. Underneath, it’s still Chrome.
Could you clarify some of these issues? I’m a long time brave user and have really enjoyed using it and haven’t noticed any issues besides some if their Web 3.0 integrations that you can turn off.
Always happy to find Better options though.
Instead of downvoting you, as is the style on these types of platforms it seems… I’ll actually try to link a few websites. One moment.
EDIT:
Crypto is dumb and bad for the environment
“reward” system, which is not cool
Further issues some have with the browser
And really, it is just YET ANOTHER Chromium browser, which gives Google MORE dominance on the web, which is a really really BAD thing. They are the ones who are trying everything in their power to not only siphon data off of you to sell to shady businesses, but also don’t like how we can block ads, which I care the most about, personally. I’m sure there are plenty more people who are way more knowledgeable than I that can explain the domino effect of what happens when a company has total domination in a field, be it technology or otherwise.
EDIT2: Opera (and Opera GX) for those that like it for some reason…
Thank you for the assist with the reply. I’d also like to add some recent comments the CEO has said…
Thanks for actually answering my question. It was a genuine question based on my opinion for what I knew.
Based on those articles, the crypto stuff doesn’t necessarily worry me as much as the affiliate highjacking that they were caught doing. I wasn’t aware. Honey recently got caught up In a scandle just as bad if not worse (by scale of users).
And yeah, I heard Opera was pretty terrible. I wanna say I heard the developers of themselves opera left and created Vivaldi and Opera is Chinese owned I think? I could be wrong on that.
Either way, thanks.
Of course! I’d rather send links to someone than sit there and just downvote and move on, even if said person ignores every thing I sent. I tried to help!
My go to is this: Is it Chromium? Move on!
I want to see more Gecko and Webkit browsers than yet another freaking Chromium browser!
The Chinese ownership is stated in the “opera is shady as fuck!” link I sent! When you have time, and if you care enough, I’d recommend looking at the myriad reasons why they are both just really bad browsers, even for someone who can ignore the crypto garbage!
Anyway, have a good rest of your day, Jack! :)
Yeah, I’m not exactly thrilled on chrome either but at a certain point I think it comes down to “who’s fucking me the least”. Which I totally understand it’s probably still chrome but I think just like with privacy, there is no sweet spot with browsers. It’s all subjective on each person’s threshold and what they want/need.
Call me crazy, but an example I’ve been thinking about is this:
Firefox is great. But with their recent TOS addition a lot of people want to jump ship of which ive seen a lot reference forks of Firefox. If, hypothetically, mozilla followed suit and became the next google, wouldnt a lot of those forks just be getting their updates from upstream (depending on the type)? And either way, they would be gecko which is developed by mozilla. So if 10 years from now mozilla goes the data route then we could be back in the same predicament.
Of course, those forks might not add crypto or screw over creators by affiliate link highjacking so I get there’s more to it then that.
But either way, I kinda look at these things like the Signal messenger argument. Is it a perfect solution? No, some people say go further because it’s centralized but it does offer a great mix of security and eas of access. And I think those trade offs apply to browsers as well.
Anyways, thanks again and have a good one as well! I appreciate the discussion!
Also, the new owners run payday loan schemes.
https://hindenburgresearch.com/opera-phantom-of-the-turnaround/
i’ve been using brave for a long time and never had issues, although i’ve had to disable all of their random useless features, very easily done in the settings
it’s the only chromium based browser with a full ad blocker and it has more than a few really useful differences to chrome
it worked incredibly well on lower spec phones as well
Plus the CEO is MAGA
Lots of these are still American, and Bluesky isnt any-less of a walled garden, they just haven’t reached enshitification-critical-mass yet.
Yeah, the list does not fit this community
Headquarters Seattle, Washington, United States
OP, quite a few of these are still American, some open source, some not. It’s more like a generic list of alternatives to mainstream.
When it’s FOSS it doesn’t matter so much where they’re based, fortunately
BlueSky and Brave for sure aren’t FOSS.
Being FOSS alone doesn’t help much if it’s a service that requires you to connect to a server by a private American company. Until 2017 Reddit was FOSS too, but at that point it was already hopelessly enshittified
Edit: changed “until recently” to “until 2017”
Saying “this FOSS is American” is a little like saying “any wheat in a meal makes it Egyptian because that’s where wheat comes from.” FOSS doesn’t have borders, because it can be used, forked, and modified by anyone. Even if an American created it, as soon as it becomes FOSS, it is a worldwide project.
lol… Brave… Come on man.
Yeah, I was gonna say… Recommending Brave isn’t a great look right now. Especially right in the wake of the Brave CEO going off on that unhinged ultra conservative rant.
And Firefox recently had its own controversy, with the removal of their “we promise never to sell your info” section of their ToS. When questioned, they basically responded with “well some jurisdictions define “sell” as “exchanging for money”… We don’t agree with that. But because some jurisdictions do define it that way, we need to remove that section. All we want to do is exchange your info for money. But again, we don’t think that should be considered selling your info.”
What rant?
Mullvad has a search engine now (Leta)
Did you respond to the right comment? I was discussing browsers, not search engines.
Yeah Mullvad also has a browser (which is well-known), but now it has a search engine as well
Just wanted to say that it is the perfect replacement for brave
Bluesky absolutely belongs in the left column.
It’s not Transparent, Decentralized or Open Source.
It is a centralized social media network exactly like Twitter. The only ‘open’ part is a protocol that lets you interact with their, private, service.
The fact that it is ‘open source’ is largely a red herring, if Bluesky decides to no longer support their protocol then it is worthless. It cannot simply be forked and remain useful.
Bluesky is simply engaging in a PR campaign to steal customers from Twitter. It is exactly the same as Twitter in all of the ways that matter. It can be purchased by Musk or manipulated by the existing owner in the same way as Twitter.
Making a Bluesky account is simply trusting a new corporation to not act like a corporation in the future… which is a pretty naive position.
Ecosia is not open source, or decentralized. It is a private search engine based in Germany that provides search results from the major search engines and sells advertisements via Yahoo and Microsoft ad networks. These ad networks are part of Surveillance Capitalism and earn their money primarily by spying on you, collating your data and selling it/using it to place ads.
Stremio is largely a piece of software used to funnel people into paying for monthly for pirate streaming services. It’s not getting rid of Netflix or Disney+, it’s giving you the option of paying Russian or North Korean supported cybergangs instead of Netflix for access to streaming content.
The real open source alternative is Jellyfin. Then using qBittorrent along with Sonarr and Radarr to self-host your own media server.
The other suggestions are mostly okay with minor gripes.
- They could add GrapheneOS as an Android alternative.
- Linux Mint is not a bad option but ‘What Linux Distro should we recommend to new people’ is a contentious topic in the community, Mint is fine but there are other options (EndeavourOS is Arch Linux installed with the Calamares graphical installer and some sane options for a desktop PC, btw)
- While Signal isn’t ‘open source’. It is, for the moment, a secure option that doesn’t require a lot of user knowledge to setup. It is a vastly superior choice than using social media for messaging without requiring a lot of technical knowledge on the user’s part.
It is exactly the same as Twitter in all of the ways that matter.
I think the fucking Nazi at the head matters.
There are Nazis at the head of Lemmy instances. Because it isn’t centralized it’s very easy to deal with.
When there is a centrally controlled social media and a Nazi takes over, it is a huge problem and requires a large amount of social effort to solve.
Bluesky could be purchased by Elon (or the current owner may decide they prefer the alt right by this time next year) and then we’d be in the same situation.
The weakness in Twitter and Bluesky is central control. Elon just provided a very poignant example as to why.
Don’t use Bluesky and also delete Twitter. Don’t support the idea of a single person or entity controlling the social lives of everyone else.
+1. Was really surprised to see ecosia (searx!?) and stremio as the only options of their categories; kinda sketchy…
Graphene should also for sure be included, even if it’s Pixel only. I don’t care that much about Bluesky as I’ve dealt first-hand with trying to get my gen-x mother on mastodon, and failing spectacularly. It’s not better in the long run, but in the short term it’s good to leave Twitter, simply to lose Elon some money. Either way, the list is kinda weird.
Edit: also, only mention droidify and not plain f-droid, obtainium, and Aurora? What?
Edit: corrected last edit
Fucking brave shows it’s ugly head again. The only thing worse than a browser owned by a greedy corpo is a browser that is owned by two greedy corpos, one of which is mostly a crypto scam corpo.
Revanced is just a cracked YouTube app isn’t it?
It goes beyond just cracking, with support for features like SponsorBlock and Return YouTube Dislike, but essentially yes. It’s not a meaningful YouTube “alternative”, just a tweaked version of same.
Yes it is, if you want something different there is Newpipe, Tubular (with sponsor block and returndislike) , or Freetube. Probably others as well.
None of these let you login, if that is something you need.
They all still rely on YouTube for content. Of course the problem is that the real alternatives (such as PeerTube) have only a fraction of the content.
I don’t think BlueSky is a great alternative, it’s still American and also still pretty big tech
But it needs to stay. Mastodon is better, but Bluesky has momentum, and anything to get people off Twitter.
Mastodon is still there, and first.
I also still don’t fully understand if it can be categorized as decentralized.
Nope, its a twitter clone
Suggesting linux mint specifically is good. Linux is overwhelming to new users, don’t give them choice paralysis too.
I completely agree! I switched to Linux Mint yesterday, and please don’t give me a bunch of alternatives before even deciding to try out Linux 🤣 Took me much longer to take the leap BECAUSE of all those alternatives.
How’s it going so far?
I honestly agree here. Better to suggest a specific distro than just saying “use Linux”.
There are several reasons why Linux Mint is to be recommended:
- That specific distro is almost superlightweight on the resources so even superold computers and laptops can run it smoothly
- it is ‘‘Windows- like’’ so transitional users can easily transfer
- Linux is compatible and supports even the oldest hardware (or has a ‘‘driver code support’’ for it). Remember that good Canon scanner without drivers for windows? Now you can use it.
- Linux has ‘‘try without installing’’ option
I personally transitioned more than ten years ago; started with Ubuntu and that was fine, but then I discovered that Mint ‘‘flies’’. :-)
Deffinitely to be recommended to a wide public who wants to transition.
Ecosia is a German web search engine based on Bing and Google’s index.
Qwant is a French web search engine based on Bing but which has been working on its own index for a while.
I just found out that Ecosia and Qwant started teaming up last year to build a European search index. I hope something will come out of it. https://blog.ecosia.org/eusp/PeerTub is developped by French non-profit Framasoft, which also develops multiple de-gooling apps: collaborative docs, forms, agenda, or host other open-source collaboration tools. https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/
I hope something will come out of it.
Same, as soon as I heard they were developing an European search index i instantly switched to Qwant.
I like how it starts with getting off Twitter and trying out Lemmy and ends with switching to Linux.
While this list is itself could use a major rework, I’m happy to see that this list, originally posted on reddit specifically, gives visibility to lemmy as a reddit alternative.
Lichess instead of chess(dot)com.
Thanks to another post in this community I found out about and it is great.
- Open source
- No ads
- unlimited puzzels from real games
- No constant message to buy premium
- All the finances are public
You can donate to the project, if you have the means and enjoy the app please do.
And their tutorials to learn how to play are fire !
signal is a good option for messaging. it is technically american, but i feel like FOSS projects should generally get a pass.
also, as an american who is very not okay with what our (russia’s) government (puppet) is doing, wouldn’t supporting non-american businesses mean paying the tariffs and supporting the oligarchs? i’m not really sure what us yanks can do besides just trying not to spend ANY money.
Signal is extremely expensive, they pay $15m+ to Google and Amazon because they don’t self-host so around half of their donations go directly to tech oligarchy
what us yanks can do besides just trying not to spend ANY money.
That’s about to get a lot easier. How do you feel about a $3000 laptop? Car manufacturing might just stop temporarily. They’ve got a month to figure out how to change pretty major processes that companies may not have the current ability to change.
And let’s see if they’re going to move into the US or out.
In the context of the parallels now being drawn between post-WW1 Germany’s slide to WW2 and present-day USA’s situation, I worry that the major quality-of-life hit starting to happen in the US might be at least slightly on purpose.
Aside from the “Krasnov” explanation for such intention (which seems compelling but I haven’t yet seen enough evidence to have a strong opinion either way about), another perhaps simpler explanation (either instead of or in addition to that) could be that he is gambling that the same poor, disempowered, uneducated subset of people in the US who end up being easily stirred into a military mindset fever are the same ones who will easily forget that the leader promising them their “national pride and identity” back is the same one whose decisions accelerated that very descent into poverty, disempowerment, and poor education (& undermined press) in order to create that pliable situation.
I vividly remember in history class seeing the photos from the post-Versailles-treaty period, of German kids flying kites made of nearly worthless Deutchmarks, and people with wheelbarrows full of notes paying for bread. Hitler was able to so easily stir up people “with no hope or dignity left” by promising prosperity based on building autobahns, factories, etc - manipulating their despair to hijack rational or compassionate thought. Anyone informed and principled enough to see through that slide to madness and act accordingly ended up running for their lives (along with the many others who had to run just for being born a certain way). It looks a bit like the situation in the US is on the precipice of sliding that way, with the compounding factor that online click-hungry faux-press and automated disinformation/propaganda bots on social networks are able to very quickly create and maintain cult-like bubbles in which a “leader” can manufacture shadows and “instruct” followers to jump at those shadows in the same breath, under the assumption that enough people will be gullible and/or lazy enough to fall for it unquestioningly.
I really think the people in the US who are not part of that subset need to be very proactive (in real-life terms, not just rage-scrolling & rage-clicking) in being the bulwark against that slide to madness, and right now - starting to react months from now might already be too late to avoid dangerous global conflicts escalating, and new ones starting. I am very wary of doom-and-gloom hyperbole, and aware that overstating things can risk fostering apathy instead of overcoming it, but I think this is one of those rare historic moments when such statements are not hyperbole.
Agree 100% with everything you said. Trump could easily blame immigrants, woke, or invent a fake enemy to blame for the economic destruction etc he caused and MAGA would believe it.
Threema is a swiss based messenger which e2e encryption.
