Looking for focused alternatives to Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc Not just for myself but for my family members and friends who I wish to keep in touch with… any other threads going on about this? Maybe have a general thread and subsequent migration movements, we really need to act on this social life fascist monopoly we’ve became hostages to…
What’s App : Signal.
Instagram: Pixelfed
TikTok: loops
YouTube: peertube
Xitter: Mastodon (pleroma, akkoma, etc …)
Google maps: open street map
Reddit: Lemmy 😉
Google search: duck duck go, startpage
I’ll let you Google the names of the different apps.
DuckDuckGo has a history of working with Microsoft to track users. Startpage is straight up owned by advertising company.
Use a search engine proxy like 4get, or a full meta search engine like SearXNG or MetaGer that pulls its data from multiple sources at once.
Adding in yt-dlp. Not a platform but a useful tool to download youtube videos for archival or redistribution.
Signal: SimpleX
Hotel: trivago…
Ok jokes aside, add to that:
Whatsapp: SimpleX, Matrix Google Photos: Immich Reddit: Lemmy, Mbin, and Piefed
On phone instead of google maps I recommend Organic Maps! Best way to use open street map.
OSMAnd is another option, it’s better in some ways, but worse in others.
Matrix for discord as well.
No love for Bluesky as a Xitter alternative?
Use mastodon and bridge your account to bluesky and ask people who you follow to please follow the bridge (or just join mastodon) so you can interact.
Bluesky is slightly better than twitter in that it’s distributed and does technically have federation. But federation on bluesky means you just mirror the entire network which makes it non-feasible for self hosters and small communities. Not to mention that once they do enshittify that they will probably pull some tomfoolery to keep people from migrating their PDS, to whatever relay they want.
Didn’t bsky turn on federation last year?
It’s a good temporary alternative. Will probably enshittify down the line, but for now it’s okay.
Bsky seems like a good alternative now. Though unlike Mastodon, it does come with an expiration date until it turns to shit. I use it alongside mastodon as that is where most Twitter folks fled to. Just, I would not put all my eggs on the bsky basket.
I mean, that should be everyone’s stance when it comes to online stuff, even for the fediverse as nobody knows if/when the server owner might go crazy or the host goes boom, people should always be ready to jump ship or to try a new service searching for something better
Bluesky isn’t a twitter alternative, it’s staged opposition.
Bsky is just another corporate venture, it is probably better than any other commercial alternative but it will inevitably go the same route as the others people are fleeing.
Facebook: friendica
I kind of liked hubzilla last I dabbled in one of those type apps.
Haven’t heard of that. If it’s centralized it’s a hard no for me though so hopefully it’s not
https://hubzilla.org/page/info/admin_guide
Similar to Friendica, personal page style fediverse software.