My Alternatives to Big Tech

Alternative social media image with an eye

The purpose of this page is to offer some alternatives to the traditional centralised Big Tech services such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. I’m noticing more and more from hearings and also documentaries such as The Social Dilemma that we are not the customers of these free services, but the advertisers are the customers, and we are the product. I fully realise that a service is never fully free as someone has to pay for the hosting, administration and moderation, and that is either funded by a sponsor, advertisements, or us paying to subscribe.

The problem is that very large centralised services cost a lot of money to operate. There are open source products, but the cost is often the hosting required for it to be shared and used by many people. So we are often free to download open source software but to have it work for cloud sync or be available to the public does cost money to host and have network access. So yes one alternative is that services get decentralised and operate on smaller nodes/hubs where they can take on and reflect local cultures or interests and be cheaper to maintain. We already see this with many decentralised social networks and even cloud hosting services, and many have even moved to proper peer-to-peer services where the data moves between the computers themselves.

If plain advertising was sufficient then yes it could fund services online but as we the users got better and better at blocking adverts, the game started to change. Service providers also realised the power of being able to target adverts to specific niches of users based on their interests. This in turn gets them higher revenue from advertisers as this type of advertising is more valuable. So this results in service providers (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, etc) needing to analyse your content and behaviour (what do you stop to read or look at) to target the right people. This in turn leads to the need to report back the success rates to advertisers (proving how many people are looking at the adverts).

The above on its own is not yet fully crossing the line but where it has started to go even further is the realisation from advertisers that they can target specific messages to identified categories of users by needs, fears, geographic location, political persuasion, etc and actually influence behaviour and discussions. Not all advertisers are selling toilet paper as we are hearing more and more that many have political or even macroeconomic interests, and these ‘messages’ can potential sway elections and destabilise countries from within.

So with this in mind my thoughts go along the lines that a centrally managed service is a lot easier to manipulate or monitor or influence as it has a central point of entry to the whole network. A decentralised and peer-to-peer type network, or one with proper end-to-end encryption, is going to be a lot more difficult as there are multiple points of entry, often scattered throughout the world. For example if Hubzilla has hubs in China, USA, Germany and Switzerland, you could choose which one you want to join the network from, and that hub could allow/disallow certain rules and even connections to other Hubzilla hubs. These options already exist but most people are just not aware of them. Because they are far smaller, their costs are a lot lower to maintain. Someone still has to pay to run them, but that is often done through donations or in many cases just a personal sponsorship by the admin. It’s not perfect but it’s an option.

So I’m starting the list below which will not be some final exhaustive list of alternatives. It will be what is working for me and I’ll add a comment by each trying to highlight why. I am in favour of very easy to set-up alternatives eg. through one-click installation scripts with Softaculous (often included with cPanel hosting) on cheap cPanel hosting which could cost around $10 pm for a family, organisation, or medium size groups to share and use.

I’m also not making it an open source only list as some may be reasonably priced commercial services ie. often open source products, but the hosting service is paid for (if you can’t host yourself). For some services below I have done video overviews showing what they look like, and in these cases I have put a link to the video to quickly give you a feel of what the product looks like.

If you are in any doubt about sites making use of deep tracking and 3rd party cookies etc to profile your behaviour, just try going to Blacklight and putting the URL in to check.

Michael Horowitz’s Defensive Computing Checklist is also an excellent resource to read through for tips around using any of Big Tech’s products or services.

Type

Replaces

With

E-Mail

GMail

MailChimp

MS Exchange

Both ProtonMail and Tutanota have free services up to certain limits. Both offer full encryption of contents, with non-users receiving a link to open the secure mail and to reply. Being secure, if you lose your password, you lose access to the content of all your mails. Right now, only Tutanota has a safe search option for content of e-mails. Only Proton Mail uses interoperable OpenPGP for encryption to/from numerous other mail services which support it.


If you have a GMail address and want to keep it:

* You can activate IMAP syncing and then setup Thunderbird with Enigmail extension (or latest version of Thunderbird has OpenPGP built in). Anything encrypted with Thunderbird will NOT be readable (contents) by Google.

* Or use FlowCrypt extension with Gmail in the browser as well as a mobile app, which allow OpenPGP encrypted mail to/from your GMail address.


cPanel hosting allows you to set up your private e-mail server with an optional domain name if you buy one. cPanel hosting costs around $10 pm or even less, and will provide other services too. You can move this type of hosting and retain the e-mail address if you bought your own domain name. For self-hosted VPS services you can try Webuzo which is about $2 pm and offers similar functionality.







listmonk – a standalone, self-hosted, newsletter and mailing list manager. It is fast, feature-rich, and packed into a single binary. It uses a PostgreSQL database as its data store. See an installation guide here.


Mailcow – an excellent alternative to GMail if you want to set up and manage your own self-hosted mail server. It has a modern web interface, but does require a good 1.5 GB of memory to run. See also DMS which is a fullstack e-mail server implementaion running inside a Docker container.








grommunio - the grommunio project functions well as a drop-in replacement for Exchange. The developers connect components to the platform the same way Microsoft does, and they support RPC (Remote Procedure Call) with the HTTP protocol.


File Sharing and storage

GDrive

DropBox

NextCloud has a wealth of add-ons for extra functionality too (see below). Can have two-factor authentication and even full encryption. See my video here on NextCloud.


OpenMediaVault (OMV) allows one to set up the file sharing from home with the added advantage of running a few additional services from within docker containers inside OMV. This can run from a Raspberry Pi.

Peergos is a peer-to-peer (IPFS protocol) encrypted global filesystem with fine-grained access control designed to be resistant to surveillance of data content or friendship graphs. It will have a secure messenger, with optional interoperability with email, and a totally private and secure social network, where users are in control of who sees what (executed cryptographically). You also get the ability to socialize with your friends in the platform using the newsfeed.

Calendar

Google
Calendar

NextCloud and Hubzilla both have WebDav connectivity, allowing your mobile device to sync with the calendar.

Event Managers

Facebook Events
Meetup

Mobilizon is a free and open source online tool, that can federate, to help manage your events and communities as an alternative to Facebook Events or Meetup. Mobilizon is a federated software: hosts can install it on a server to create instances that act as Mobilizon websites. Mobilizon instances can be federated together, so a profile registered on instance A may contribute to a group created on instance B.

Contacts

Google Contacts

As above, NextCloud has WebDav connectivity for syncing contacts with mobile devices. My video on NextCloud.

ToDos

Google Notes / Tasks

NextCloud has various add-ons for notes which will sync. I use QOwnNotes within NextCloud.

KanBoard and Wekan are excellent kanban task management option which can be self-hosted.

Search

Google Search
Bing

Whoogle can be self-hosted within an Open Media Vault service, or just installed on a server.

Duck Duck Go is already supported within many browsers. Both these options use Google Search, but they strip out all identifying information which is not passed to Google.


Swisscows is also privacy respecting and is more than just binary search.


Searx is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from more than 70 search services. Users are neither tracked nor profiled. Additionally, searx can be used over Tor for online anonymity, and can be self-hosted as an option.


YaCy is a free peer-to-peer search engine that you host on your own computer, but a little more complex to set up.

Social Media

Facebook
Instagram
Reddit
Slack
Twitter
Blogger

MS Teams

See my dedicated page on Alternatives to Big Tech Social Media.

Video

YouTube
Twitch

Lbry.tv is said to offer better revenue than YouTube, and it has an auto import from your YouTube channel. Both are Peer-to-peer services you sign up on for free. My channel is at https://lbry.tv/@GadgeteerZA.

BitChute

Peertube is another peer-to-peer alternative and here is my channel at Peertube. Peertube will also handle live streaming.


NewPipe is an open source tracker-free Android app for YouTube not requiring a Google account login.


Owncast – a self-hosted, decentralised, alternative to Amazon Twitch or YouTube Live for live video streaming and web chat server for use with existing popular broadcasting software. Can also be used for live-streaming of a conference.


Open Streaming Platform (OSP) – an open-source, RTMP streamer software front-end for Arut’s Nginx-RTMP Module. OSP was designed as a self-hosted alternative to services such as Twitch.tv, Ustream.tv, Mixer, and Youtube Live. OSP uses Python 3, the Flask Micro-Framework, Nginx-RTMP, VideoJS, Bootstrap, and other modules to build a home for your live streams, videos, and community.

Instant Messaging

Whatsapp
Telegram

Note: Whatsapp has recently (Jan 2021) started to force users to accept terms that allow them to share users metadata with Facebook.

Signal is mainstream and has a good reputation for privacy. It seems to have managed to circumvent censorship now, too.


Session is forked from Signal and requires no phone number or e-mail address to register. It is decentralised, but there has been comment about it departing from the Signal protocol.


Element (Matrix Network) is decentralised and offers fully encrypted rooms that hosting services cannot access, and offers options for strict admission to those rooms.

SimpleX - requires no IDs, e-mail, or phone number to register. No access is needed for contacts or metadata. It is E2EE. 


Briar (Android only) and Jami (Android, iOS, Linux, Windows, macOS) are both peer-to-peer privacy based. No personal info needed to register. This means these can work directly from phone to phone across the Internet. Briar can work also using just Bluetooth or Wi-Fi (no Internet required), and Jami will work locally across any common local area network which phones are connected to.

Bridgify is designed to work on local Bluetooth (max about 100m) during natural disasters, a protest, at large events, at schools, etc. It will create a mesh network, so one or more other peers can help transmit messages further. 


Threema from Switzerland has just gone open source in 2020 and is likely more privacy respecting than Signal itself, as it requires no e-mail address, phone number or SIM to register and use it.


Delta Chat is an open source native secure messaging app that uses your existing e-mail account as a communications medium via encrypted e-mails. Everyone is potentially a user, with no central account required.


Databag is a self-hosted messaging service. It is decentralised and can also federate. It has Android and iOS clients in the app stores.

Note: Telegram was popular for circumvention of censorship blocks, but there are issues around its use of SMS interception for registration and 2FA. If it gets used, it is recommended that the PIN be activated, and end-end-encryption is activated with secret chat (it’s off by default). But Signal or others are preferred.







Phone

Android
iOS

PinePhone is a Linux phone focussed on privacy.

GrapheneOS is an OS that can be flashed to many Android phones to replace Google’s version altogether without any of the Google Play Store or similar functionality. You can still side load Android apps.

Read It Later

Pocket

Wallabag is another service that can be easily installed under cPanel (for self-hosting). I use an Android app with it.

Photos

Flickr
Google Photos

I self-host my Piwigo on my VPS (along with other services I’m running). It offers posting to albums, commenting, geolocation, ratings, and much more based on additional 3rd party add-ons. My site can be seen at https://photos.gadgeteer.co.za/.


Immich – open-source self-hosted alternative to Google Photos. It has very similar features to Google Photos, apart from not having any photo editing capability.

LibrePhotos is a slightly simpler alternative to Google photos.

PhotoPrism
Lychee
Clevereto
Photonix
NextCloud Photos

Document Editing

GDocs
GSheet
O365
MS VS Code

Cryptpad does not only secure encrypted document editing/sharing/collaboration for text documents, spreadsheets and presentations, but also polls, kanban and whiteboards. There is even a chat facility for people collaborating in real-time together. I use the instance at https://cryptpad.fr/, but there are others (eg. https://cryptpad.disroot.org/) or you can self-host your own using their provided docker image. It is also great for sharing a public link for others to view. See my video about CryptPad.

VSCodium is a community-driven, freely-licensed binary distribution of Microsoft’s editor VS Code. This project includes special build scripts that clone Microsoft’s vscode repo, run the build commands, and upload the resulting binaries for you to GitHub releases. These binaries are licensed under the MIT license. Telemetry is disabled.

Web Trackers

Google
Facebook

Privacy Badger extension from EFF automatically learns to block invisible trackers.

UBlock Origin – An efficient blocker (not just adverts) add-on for various browsers. Fast, potent, and lean.


Firefox extension Facebook Container – Facebook. Well contained. Keep the rest of your life to yourself.


Blacklight – A Real-Time Website Privacy Inspector which will scan a site for you to check.

Web Browsing

Google Chrome
Microsoft Edge

Brave is a cross-platform privacy embedded browser with many extensions folks would use separately, already inside the browser such as enforcing https, script blocking, cookie control, ad blocking, fingerprint prevention. It also has options for blocking of various social media tracking. There is an option to earn a few Dollars per month for watching some adverts too.

Tor Browser (Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android and F-Droid) is best known for its ways of circumventing censorship firewalls. Tor Browser already comes with HTTPS Everywhere, NoScript, and other patches to protect your privacy and security.

Analytics

Google Analytics
StatCounter

AWStats is a free installation on most cPanel hosting services. It does not use 3rd party cookies or trackers. It reads the various log files from the server and displays them in a summary report. It has a few extra plug-ins you can enable for more advanced functionality. Ironically, you see more visits because many users already block trackers and 3rd party cookies, and so evade reporting via Google Analytics. It works off your server log files.

Matomo (ex-Piwik) is also a free installation on most cPanel hosting and is a full-featured direct competitor to Google Analytics (personally I think better) with well-designed integrated GDPR compliance. You can opt to pay for their cloud hosted version, but it is free for self-hosting. It can be configured to show what search engines brought traffic to your site, what keywords are used, search terms on your site, what social network sent traffic to your site, and much more.

Android Play Store

Android Play Store

For users who do not want to use Google single-Signon (or cannot such as newer Huawei users) there are alternative stores which will install most apps just fine and offer separate per-app logins.

F-Droid is best known as a store for open source apps and contains a few apps you will not even find in the Google store.


Aurora Store allows the option of which Google services you want to make use of, if any.


Aptoide is an open source app store with over 150 million users worldwide since its launch over 10 years ago. It is possibly one of the closest and best google play store alternatives.


XDA Developers offers some advanced tools and utilities.


APk Mirror has a large number of APKs to install but note these are usually just mirrors of existing APKs from the Google Store so will have the Google sign-in and services still active.

Keyboards

Google GBoard
Microsoft SwiftKey

OpenBoard is very stable but does not yet have swipe.

AnySofKeyboard has swipe included too.


FlorisBoard is still in alpha but has some good features.

Voice Assistants

Google Home
Alexa

Mycroft is the world’s leading open source voice assistant. It is private by default and completely customizable.

Their software runs on many platforms — on desktop, our reference hardware, a Raspberry Pi, or your own custom hardware.

Customer Relationship

Zendesk

Chatwoot is an open-source omnichannel customer support software.

Business Networking

LinkedIn

vutuv - Think of it as a free, fast and secure open-source alternative for LinkedIn or XING (remembering that LinkedIn has featured plenty of times as the number one collector of user metadata, even above Facebook). This is one of the very few fully open source alternatives to LinkedIn. It is designed around speed and lack of clutter, so it is suited to slow network speeds.

Security

Google Authenticator
Microsoft Authenticator

2FAS - open-source (including server with Docker image) 2FA app for Android and iOS. No account registration required. It has a desktop browser extension that gets an OK from the linked mobile app.

Revision date: 2023-06-14

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