
Switching.social: ethical, easy-to-use and privacy-conscious alternatives - dredmorbius
https://switching.social
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wishinghand
We may need a category for Reddit one day too.

I'd love to recommend an app for messaging, and a few for Adobe.

Messaging: Wire. It's always secure by default, not a setting you have to
switch anywhere. It has a Slack-like paid service for businesses, but is free
for personal users. Based in Germany. I enjoy it's interface and it has an
option to verify the user you're speaking with, along with a fingerprint or
password screen to just open the app.

Art: Affinity Photo (bitmaps) and Designer (vectors). I didn't see anything on
the website if the software has to be open source, so if that's a priority
these are out. However, they're pay one price ($50 or $60 USD), and have a
similar interface to their Adobe counterparts and near parity on features,
including a few that I don't believe Adobe has. They're also working on
Publisher, which is an analog to InDesign.

There's also Skylum's Luminar, which is a Lightroom replacement. I don't have
as much experience with it, but there are companies striving to accommodate
that audience.

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CM30
Neat list, though testing out some of these showed me why normal users may not
be willing to use them as much as the mainstream versions. I mean, I looked at
most of the Medium alternatives and created accounts there, and posted a few
articles to see how they'd work.

In doing so, I realised that:

1\. Most of them still lack the WYSIWYG side of things, which is a huge part
of why Medium.com is so popular (and why the likes of WordPress do so well as
hosted alternatives).

2\. Their use of Markdown makes things confusing, since the 'language' has
about a million different versions all of which support different things, and
said sites don't document which they're using.

3\. In some cases, the interfaces glitched, like with Plume not loading the
full post and instead only showing about the first four paragraphs of it in
the post editor.

Point being, the alternatives here really need to do more work on the UI
design and documentation side, and lack the standard of polish or
professionalism their corporate competitors have.

~~~
wishinghand
Only a few of these may need polish. The majority are well polished, mature
products. It is true that UI/UX can suffer on libre or open source software.

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stevenicr
cool collection! wish the h3's were more like 1.75em or so, they get a little
lost in the mix when scrolling with my system.

Was kind of hoping to see buddypress plugin for wordpress on the section of
facebook alternatives... I know it's a little more involved to spin up and
deploy than just a WP or mastadon - but a wp + bp + media plugin with some
spam blocking settings can be a viable alt.

I'd consider adding startpage.com to the google alternatives - though it's
technically still google results, so it does not get you out of their
censorship bubble, it does provide a little less spying.

Hope to see more niche search options in the future.

alt for G analytics.. awstats, analog stats, webalizer?

alt for the internet, would scuttlebutt kind of count? ipfs? tor? Firechat?

Nice to see these options and some details on how to use some of them is
great, makes it a resource worth sharing.

