#alternativeto

[youtube-privacy-union]

YouTube and Other Alternatives Directory | General Recommendations

Internet Archive 💝✒️🌐

A non-profit website that serves as a massive online library, with thousands of books, videos, songs, audiobooks, podcasts, images, video games, and more. It can be difficult to navigate at times, but is overall a great option for information and entertainment. There are many YouTube videos on the Archive as well, and watching directly from there does not give YouTube traffic. As for the Wayback Machine, current consensus seems to be that YouTube only receives traffic during the initial archiving process, not later visits.

ProtonVPN 💝✒️🍎🤖🍏🪟🐧

Proton is a non-profit company based in Switzerland with a strong focus on privacy. They have a VPN, which, while it does have a paid tier, is a great free option for a VPN.

uBlock Origin 💝✒️🍎🤖🍏🪟🐧

A good adblocker is an important part of navigating the web. uBlock Origin is a browser extension that is generally regarded as a great option, but it is not accessible on Chrome, and may also be inaccessible on other chromium based browsers.

Privacy Badger 💝✒️🍎🤖🍏🪟🐧

Another browser extension specifically designed to block trackers, specifically designed to be user friendly. It requires virtually no knowledge to use.

AlternativeTo 💝🌐

A website designed to help you discover and compare alternatives to various platforms and websites. If there's something you'd like to know alternatives to that isn't covered by this directory, it's probably on AlternativeTo.

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[degenezijde]

European alternatives for popular services | European Alternatives

We help you find European alternatives for digital service and products, like cloud services and SaaS products.

[mtg-player1]

I figured I should share one of my favorite websites on here:

AlternativeTo lets you find apps and software for Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, iPad, Android, Android Tablets, Web Apps, Online, Windows Tab

alternative to [dot] net is a very useful tool to find alternative websites and apps. So that you don't get stuck feeling like you have to use this one service when there actually are a lot of others. You can also comment and vote to say what the best alternative to something is and talk about what is wrong with any given app or website or webbrowser or whatever (software).

[dvdmerwe]

“TikTok’s takeover in the US has prompted users to join an alternative social platform called UpScrolled. The app, which is available on Android and iOS, currently holds the 12th spot in Apple’s App Store, and it’s struggling to keep up with an influx of new traffic.”

Yes, it’s not the first alternative to TikTok as we’ve seen RedNote and also Loops (a decentralised Fediverse alternative) as well as others.

UpScrolled is still a centralised hosting service hosted in Dublin, Ireland, and owned by an Australian company using private funding. So, it is a step better than US ownership and hosting like nearly all the major centralised social media platforms are.

TikTok’s secret sauce is its algorithm though, but the downside of that algorithm is that it can be manipulated, which like with Facebook, has the power to change minds and influence users.

With UpScrolled, and Loops, you don’t get this sort of manipulative algorithm. This may also result in less addictive doom-scrolling.

Do we have enough social media platforms yet? Well clearly not, as many new ones are starting up and only time will tell how they survive into the future. There is currently no advertising on UpScrolled, but they are probably going to have ads in future for the platform to be sustainable. They do state though: “But they’ll be designed and managed by us. No Google Ads. No third-party tracking. No targeting based on personal data.”

On privacy, they state: “UpScrolled will never share your data with third parties for marketing, profiling, or commercial gain. We only disclose user data as required by Australian law — such as in response to a valid court order or lawful request — and always in accordance with our privacy policy.”

It is available on Android and iOS right now, and their future plans include desktop versions.

See https://www.theverge.com/news/867958/tiktok-upscrolled-app-us-takeover or their website at https://upscrolled.com

[dvdmerwe]

Apart from security and privacy, as well as being a cloud based solution, CryptPad is pretty feature packed. For me, it is also a great way to share something publicly if I need to.

You may compare its privacy and security to something like Proton Docs, but where it really beats Proton Docs is that it also has spreadsheets, presentations, rich text. Kanban, code, forms, whiteboard, diagrams, and it is open source and can be self-hosted too.

See https://www.xda-developers.com/reasons-why-use-cryptpad-instead-google-docs

[dvdmerwe]

“Automation tools like IFTTT (If This Then That) have revolutionized how we connect apps, devices, and services to create workflows. However, while IFTTT is user-friendly and widely accessible, it lacks the depth, flexibility, and control some advanced users crave. Enter Huginn, a powerful, open-source platform that is often hailed as a more robust alternative to IFTTT.”

I’d actually stopped using IFTTT because the free tier was reduced to near useless with so many limitations. This looks very interesting and very powerful, although it won’t be quite as easy as IFTTT. I’m certainly going to try this out in the near future.

See https://www.xda-developers.com/huginn-free-open-source-ifttt-alternative

[dvdmerwe]

I use FreeOffice myself, mostly because it starts up super quickly (ready in under 5 secs) and has an interface that resonates with me.

Yes, LibreOffice is just as powerful and is much better known, but I find it takes nearly 30 secs to start up on my desktop PC. I also have challenges getting the themes to show the colours correctly.

The great thing though with free office packages is, you can install two, four or more of them and give them a good try out.

FreeOffice is not perfect, though, and one of the biggest drawbacks is the lack of an English grammar checker (there is a spell checker).

See https://www.xda-developers.com/5-reasons-why-freeoffice-is-a-great-microsoft-alternative

[dvdmerwe]

OnlyOffice is a suite that is available as a paid enterprise version for broad deployments, but also works completely for free on desktop and mobile operating systems. It is fully cross-platform, including Linux.

While it’s not exactly the same, the OnlyOffice UI is very close to what Microsoft offers with its own Office suite. There’s a ribbon-style UI and all the tabs are very similar, with the same options generally being available in each tab and presented in a very similar way, too.

Another great thing about OnlyOffice is that it includes some PDF tools that you can use for free, too. Essentially, this allows you to create easily fillable PDF forms, which you can send to people when you need to collect some kind of information from them.

There is also online collaboration and an OnlyOffice account is available for free with 2 GB of cloud storage.

What I do like about the cross-platform support is that you can use and be familiar with one tool across all your operating systems.

Another plus is, apart from full Microsoft DOCX compatibility and some other formats as well, it also supports the open standards ODF format.

It is free to use for non-enterprise users, but is not open source.

See https://www.xda-developers.com/reasons-onlyoffice-great-microsoft-office-alternative