Yesterday on Digital Independence Day I’ve launched a small website suggesting sustainable alternatives to BigTech products.
I’ve started with five categories: Email, Search, Maps, Browsers, Messaging.
There are some controversial picks in there like Proton Mail or Brave. They do have a pretty wide adoption but have severe downsides. I’ll probably remove them again. What do you think?
Which categories would be the next most important ones to add? Which services did I miss on the existing ones? Feedback welcome.
#DIDit #DigitalIndependenceDay



here is a comment i wrote recently listing some of the reasons not to use proton. i’d also recommend against vivaldi (proprietary), brave (so many reasons), and everything in your messaging category besides matrix (and matrix also has lots of problems but it is the least bad of the ones you’re recommending). sorry that i don’t have time to elaborate right now (it’s a lot), but for the inevitable “what about signal” question see my comment here and more here.
ps. if you do use signal, consider adjusting your Who Can Find Me By Number setting (see that link for a fun implementation of the attack against signal users who leave it as it is by default). note that the same thing could technically be done in matrix too, albeit by matrix ID instead of phone number. 😬
pps: here are my comments about tuta 🙄
Thanks for the input, Arthur. I consider removing some of those picks or at least flag them for the issues pointed out. Are there some Messaging apps you’d wholeheartedly recommend?
Sadly there are none I can recommend wholeheartedly, all have various problems 😢