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54 comments
  • 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.
  • Currently on mobile and hardly working. Can somebody please do an edit removing fakeogtwitter and the homophobecrytofascistbrowser from this list? The send it to op for replacement. Please and thank you. Cheers.

  • 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.

  • Home assistant is the gold standard for home automation now, they are light-years ahead of anything from the big tech. Billions of dollars and they can't even make a usable home automation service.

  • Nextcloud is not the same as Google Drive. Element is not the same as Netflix. Recommending bluesky as a replacement for X is at least misleading, it is neither European nor free nor is it anywhere near better than X.

    Edit: Stremio comparison with Netflix wanted to say

    • Yep, most things on that list are not drop-in replacements for these products at all, as you're supposed to change your behavior entirely. i.e.:

      • For Nextcloud, you have to self-host or to search for a provider. Nextcloud themselves aren't offering any cloud services;
      • Same for Element (which is Matrix);
      • Flashes is just Bluesky, but with only photos - these same photos can be posted on Bluesky directly.
      • ReVanced as an alternative to YouTube? You gotta be joking.
      • Stremio - if you're not looking for piracy, then this is not for you. But it's a nice touch though
      • Immich - you can only self-host it
      • Brave; Firefox - they're the lesser evil, yet they're still American
      • For Droid-ify - you gotta jump to Android first. If you want to stay on Apple, use Alt Store

      Probably the most feasible things for the regular folk to jump to are Mastodon, PeerTube, Pixelfed, Lemmy (self-hosting is not mandatory), Jitsi, Ecosia, LineageOS (if they switch phones) and Linux Mint (or any flavor of Linux for that matter).

    • Where does the Element Netflix comparison came from?

54 comments