I’m also not making it an open source only list as some may be reasonably priced commercial services ie. through one-click installation scripts with Softaculous (often included with cPanel hosting) on cheap cPanel hosting which could cost around $10 pm for a family, organisation, or medium size groups to share and use. I am in favour of very easy to set-up alternatives eg. It will be what is working for me and I’ll add a comment by each trying to highlight why. So I’m starting the list below which will not be some final exhaustive list of alternatives. Someone still has to pay to run them, but that is often done through donations or in many cases just a personal sponsorship by the admin. Because they are far smaller, their costs are a lot lower to maintain. These options already exist but most people are just not aware of them. For example if Hubzilla has hubs in China, USA, Germany and Switzerland, you could choose which one you want to join the network from, and that hub could allow/disallow certain rules and even connections to other Hubzilla hubs. ![]() A decentralised and peer-to-peer type network, or one with proper end-to-end encryption, is going to be a lot more difficult as there are multiple points of entry, often scattered throughout the world. So with this in mind my thoughts go along the lines that a centrally managed service is a lot easier to manipulate or monitor or influence as it has a central point of entry to the whole network. Not all advertisers are selling toilet paper as we are hearing more and more that many have political or even macroeconomic interests, and these ‘messages’ can potential sway elections and destabilise countries from within. The above on its own is not yet fully crossing the line but where it has started to go even further is the realisation from advertisers that they can target specific messages to identified categories of users by needs, fears, geographic location, political persuasion, etc and actually influence behaviour and discussions. This in turn leads to the need to report back the success rates to advertisers (proving how many people are looking at the adverts). So this results in service providers (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, etc) needing to analyse your content and behaviour (what do you stop to read or look at) to target the right people. This in turn gets them higher revenue from advertisers as this type of advertising is more valuable. Service providers also realised the power of being able to target adverts to specific niches of users based on their interests. If plain advertising was sufficient then yes it could fund services online but as we the users got better and better at blocking adverts, the game started to change. We already see this with many decentralised social networks and even cloud hosting services, and many have even moved to proper peer-to-peer services where the data moves between the computers themselves. So yes one alternative is that services get decentralised and operate on smaller nodes/hubs where they can take on and reflect local cultures or interests and be cheaper to maintain. So we are often free to download open source software but to have it work for cloud sync or be available to the public does cost money to host and have network access. There are open source products, but the cost is often the hosting required for it to be shared and used by many people. The problem is that very large centralised services cost a lot of money to operate. I fully realise that a service is never fully free as someone has to pay for the hosting, administration and moderation, and that is either funded by a sponsor, advertisements, or us paying to subscribe. I’m noticing more and more from hearings and also documentaries such as The Social Dilemma that we are not the customers of these free services, but the advertisers are the customers, and we are the product. The purpose of this page is to offer some alternatives to the traditional centralised Big Tech services such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
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