A list of online services to regain control over your privacy online

Hmm... It's hard to find a decent 'social media' that's free speech and not a cesspool made up of the ignorant, violent, and hateful.

Also, depending on what definition you use, forums are the original social media, Well, maybe USENET was... We tend to forget that. We're sharing links and content, we have profiles, we have private messages, and we even have messaging on specific user accounts.
 


Please do share your alternatives if you have them or believe they may be better than these.
I won't say 'better' just different...

Over the last months I've been testing various online services that I find to be among the best alternatives to mainstream services:

1. DuckDuckGo or Searx instead of Google, Bing, Yandex, Yahoo and others
2. Rumble instead YouTube
3. Lingva Translate instead of Google Translate, Bing translate or Yandex translate etc.
4. OpenStreeMap instead of Google Maps or Bing Maps
5. Proton Mail instead of Outlook, Tutanota, GMail and others
Nothing to add:
1. I'm stuck with the Duck.
2. Yup, Rumble has been the most successful. Was just saying the other day Odyssee never seemed to take off. Oh there's Bitchute but it's now overrun by conspiracies about lizard people.
4. None to add: I don't use maps since I never carry my phone out the house unless we have a sales meet (I'm too lazy to jot things down so I just record it, lol).

Worth a look
3. duck.ai Gives you access to 4 LLMs -- reasonable at translating, though not on DeepL level -- and privacy while using them.
5. gmx.com One of the earliest players. They're great. You get 10 aliases, you get pretty good spam blocking (better than gfail -- not a typo), and the mobile app is way better. The WebUI is dated, but clean (except the ads on the login screen). You don't get bombarded with security alerts every time you access your email from another browser either!
Bonus to these is software and addons which is used to access these services as well as other web sites since they affect your privacy as well:
1. Firefox instead of Chrome, MS Edge and others
2. uBlock Origin and Noscript to block ads (I use both)
3. Cookie Auto Delete to auto delete unwanted cookies
4. Linux OS instead of Windows or Mac
Nothing to add:
2. Yup, use NoScript, UBO is too much work, lol. If NoScript breaks something, I can run another browser (I have enough).
3. Don't need as I always browse in private/guest/incognito/etc.

Worth a look:
1a. Links, 100% most private browser and it'll save your but if you can't start a graphics session...
Seriously though, Librewolf. Yep it is still around and very polished. UBO preinstalled. (Although I use almost all the browsers).
1b. For mobile, I recommend DuckDuckGo browser (may be an FF fork). It gives you an alias email address without accounts. It have a fake VPN to stop apps communicating with each other. Definitely recommend!
4. Don't forget BSDs. Specifically FreeBSD. And for those afraid of it, there are BSDbuntu's like GhostBSD and NomadBSD, both highly polished with their own goals. If ReactOS is still alive, there's that, too (I think the project is likely dead).
TODO:
Alternatives to social media
1. gab.com
2. minds.com
3. IRC... Yes, it still exists and there are very many hidden place. And sometimes XDCC is faster than torrenting -- totally legal stuff like photo collections and public domain stuff, no anime or ROMS ;)
 
Last edited:
I remember USENET. I kind of miss that. I once figured out how to modify the header, in a local newsgroup though, to make it say whatever I wanted it to say.

Signed,

Matthew Campbell
 
I kind of miss that.

Those old servers are still there and they're still up and running. You pretty much have to pay for a subscription these days but I had an ISP, not that long ago, that still had access. You did need to configure your NNTP client to use a username and password but you still had access.

The ISP was Fairpoint. They provided me with DSL after they bought out the company I was already using - a small and fairly localized regional ISP. I'm currently boycotting them 'cause they made me mad. I suffer with much worse internet because of it, but not for much longer (hopefully).

But, you don't have to boycott 'em just because I did. What happened was a line went down in like January and they decided that they weren't going to fix it until spring. If you're going to service my area, you need to be able to service it properly. So, I've lived with a mix of horrible satellite and cell phones ever since. That was a few years ago. I don't usually hold a grudge but I do care who gets my money.

Also, the servers are a ghost town compared to what they used to be.

GOPHER still exists, as well. I mean, there's no real reason to use it, but it's still there.

Man, I'm old... Man, I've been 'online' for a long time...

Ah well...
 
I have once heard that DuckDuckGo now shares their search requests with Google. You might try StartPage.com which also has its own onion site.
This might be possible, as long as contract with bing allows them to share results with 3rd parties.
StartPage was btw. sold several years back, it's no longer in hands of a company that was considered trustworthy.
 
Over the last months I've been testing various online services that I find to be among the best alternatives to mainstream services:



Please do share your alternatives if you have them or believe they may be better than these.

TODO:
Alternatives to social media
Ghostery is used here quite sucessfully for blocking, tracking and filtering on firefox. Here is a review:

 
Ghostery is used here quite sucessfully for blocking, tracking and filtering on firefox.
Maybe you didn't know but Ghostery is blacklisted by prism-break.org
 
@osprey
See this GitHub discussion (prism-break repo) about Ghostery
 
And
It requires VPN from what I see since it functions in same way as Tor except over VPN.

I know there are plenty of newly born browsers, many have been posted here on forums, however I'm slightly in denial to use them because:
1. Newly born software is not as mature as mainstream ones in terms of development, they may lack patches that other browser already dealt with.
2. IDK if I'll be able to use all extensions I'm used to that are geared toward mainstream browsers
3. Due to small community of newly born browsers it's not as easy to establish trust with their makers, unless the browser is open source and popular enough to have enough eyes looking at the source code.

However out of all mainstream browsers they're all made by corporations that are not friendly to privacy, except for Firefox which all together is why I prefer it and use it.

And IRC!!
Yes, forums and IRC are solid alternatives.
 
Last edited:
You can use with without vpn but it's best used with a vpn.
I use Mullvad Browser with Mullvad VPN , never had any problems, pay 5 Euro per month and you can pay month by month. (You can use a Mullvad VPN account on 5 devices)
 
Last edited:
Hmm... It's hard to find a decent 'social media' that's free speech and not a cesspool made up of the ignorant, violent, and hateful.

Also, depending on what definition you use, forums are the original social media, Well, maybe USENET was... We tend to forget that. We're sharing links and content, we have profiles, we have private messages, and we even have messaging on specific user accounts.
What's about fediverse?
 
@osprey
See this GitHub discussion (prism-break repo) about Ghostery
Unfortunately the issue with ghostery discussed at the github site was in 2015, but there have been developments since then. It wasn't used here way back then, but it appears to be free and open source in its current guise according to wikipedia, but I haven't looked at it in depth to check. I'm not recommending anything to anyone, merely reporting what has worked here. Although I may have been misled on the FOSS aspects, in the first instance it doesn't appear so.
 
Unfortunately the issue with ghostery discussed at the github site was in 2015, but there have been developments since then. It wasn't used here way back then, but it appears to be free and open source in its current guise according to wikipedia, but I haven't looked at it in depth to check. I'm not recommending anything to anyone, merely reporting what has worked here. Although I may have been misled on the FOSS aspects, in the first instance it doesn't appear so.
I know some owners of their software who were put as "Avoid" on prism-break opened an issue explaining how they improved and asking to be removed from the list, some of them succeeded in that but not all.

Few of them also opened issues to ask to be added to white list.
All of this for obvious reasons, the site is influencing decisions of users.

You can browse issues to about listed services and programs to check how this process goes and to see reasons for failure or success.

I don't know the sate of Ghostery now, but if they're concerned about being put on avoid list they should create an issue and explain how they improved.

I'm not recommending anything to anyone, merely reporting what has worked here.
ofc. no hard feeling ;)
 
Found an interesting article on itsfoss worth reading, it's related to this thread:
I've tried going Google free a few years ago. I was using LineageOS without GAPPS but I ran into some issues of certain apps not functioning properly without GAPPS. I was using both DDG and Whoogle. The only thing I couldn't avoid was Youtube because most of the content creators only post their videos on Youtube, I was also using Odysee. In the end I ended up going back to normal Android because I rather have a working phone than to have to find work arounds to get all my apps working with LineageOS without GAPPS.

I've changed a bit of my viewpoint. I do still care about privacy but I'm not going out of may way anymore to do it for everything, meaning if it's more difficult and causes more annoyance using another tool or workaround than I get back for it than I just use it. So I use Android and Youtube and have a Google account(for my Android phone), but stuff that I can use alternatives for I do. So I use other things for search queries, Email, Contacts/Calendar. In the end most websites are full of Google trackers and Facebook trackers and it's hard to get around them even if you don't have an account for either
 
Last edited:
I'll list what I use.
Search Engine: Whoogle.
Video content: I still use Youtube.
Music: I still use Youtube Music, I was using Spotify before.
E-mail: I run my self-hosted mail setup with my own domain.
Contacts/Calendar/Files/Photos: Self-hosted Nextcloud.
Video Streaming for myself and others: Jellyfin/Plex.
Web-browser: Firefox with Betterfox user configuration and extensions: Ublock Origin, Cookie Auto Delete, and Bitwarden. I try to keep the use of extensions to a minimum and onces that are used a lot by others because of fingerprinting. I use Vivaldi as an alternative web-browser if I need one.
VPN: I have Mullvad VPN for if I want to use it.
Phone: Google Pixel with Android, I use Google Maps on there if I need it.
OS: All my computers I have run Linux and I use mostly opensource/free software with some exceptions.
Mediabox: Nvidia Shield with Android TV.
 
Last edited:
browsers: if you can make your browser unique with javascript enabled unique


meaning that you will see each time different ID and number of visits counted as 1 each time then your browser is good to go.
Just wanted to mention that cleaning cookies or rebooting OS will not help.
This is pretty old test but still quite interesting. Anyway, it is possible to hide all the info when using Firefox, but default settings in most browsers will fail this test.

One can of course disable js but then most sites will became unusable and just blocking specific sites is not feasible.

Also, none of this what users can achieve will block TLAs so as long as this is remembered one is fine with whatever permissive settings.

One thing not mentioned here that really helps is compartmentalization. This really makes difficult for google and such to trace user.
 

Members online


Top