We are starting to see for quite some time big tech trying to get the internet under their control. We have seen half of the internet starting to block proxies. Tor is not usable in the normal internet anymore. More and more services require a government issued id for their account.
And now Google went ahead and did the final blow by announcing WEI. If that gets integrated on all popular sites, there will be no more open web. We try to fight back as much as we can, but the bitter truth is most people are already ‘good little pets’ of these giants.
Most of the people, are not just okay, but want these big brothers to handle everything for them. They want to get their finances, entertainment, social medias, government services all done for them by these giants without them even knowing. They are ready to live as big brother says. Half of them already don’t have individual opinions.
Although the fight still continues, It’s time to think about plan B. What if most of internet is blocked for us privacy conscious people? We need alternatives. It’s time to build an ecosystem that we people can use without the help of popular services. There are already a lot of softwares, but we need to fill the gaps fast. We need an open hardware, accessible and a fully open software stack including everyday apps for most of our needs and entertainments. On PC it’s almost there. Mobile terribly lacks in the lowest levels, but have some apps that can help.
PC
For PC, we can still install linux on most devices, so linux. For browsing, we can use firefox or any forks of that. Proton and skiff are good alternatives for basic email, storage etc. For social media we have federated systems like lemmy, services like odysee, mewe etc. Share services that you think should be in this list
Mobile
For mobile, we miss variety in hardware section. One option might be pinephone or other linux phones. Other option might ironically be Pixel. For OS, we can use graph eneOS, cal yx OS, linux based OS etc. But setting it up is currently very hard. For browsing, firefox for android is good (I use it) which also has extensions support. Above mentioned services like proton, skiff, lemmy, odysee, mewe etc. has android apps. For IM we have briar, Session, simpleX etc. Share services that you think should be in this list
Help me document a full recommended ecosystem. Maybe we can have a recommended guide. Maybe there are better options. Discuss.
Libredirect is a Firefox addon that can redirect links to more privacy friendly services. For example, clicking someone’s YouTube link will redirect you to Piped or Invidious instead.
https://libredirect.github.io/
It could be user error, but most redirects wouldn’t work for me. I slowly removed the ones that usually didn’t go through, which left me with all of them disabled so I had to remove it. But I keep my eye open for updates
I had to tinker with the settings. Most of the default instances didn’t work for me, so I had to find the ones that did and add them.
Fortunately, there is a list of suggested public instances and a feature that lets you automatically ping them so you can see which ones work and add them to your “favorite instances.”
It’s a little bit confusing because to add your favorites, you have to temporarily enable the bypass, even if you don’t want it to auto redirect all the time, so you can add and remove your favorite instances.
And some of them have been gutted due to restrictions placed by web sites, the most notorious examples of which are libreddit and teddit.