Copyright Joseph Knapp, 10/26/2023 onward. The US technology hegemony is ripe for a shakeup, alt tech is under attack by the biden administration while the republicans choose to attack big tech, the barrier to entry is lower than you think and in terms of technology smaller is better. For example Telegram has only 30 official employees while being a billion dollar unicorn that is doing great. Signal is not very large in terms of headcount either and is doing great as well. Even after being owned by facebook for a decade, whatsapp only has about 15 employees at any one time. These companies are very nimble because of their small size and can adjust quickly if they need to much faster than their larger counterparts. The truth is you can do it too, you must likely won't end up like mark zuckerberg but having your own LLC is cool and you can use the corporate bylaws to claim things you would otherwise buy as a business expense, which is cool. Besides, you get to name the company too. For instane the LLC behind 8kun.top is called "Is it Wet Yet? INC". You could name yours something like "Free Ass Whoopins LLC", "Unlimited Salt Mine Limited", "Macrohard", "Orange Computer", "Electronic Farts", "Roe", "Just Use SQlite - Databases in Action", "Dewey, Cheatem and Howe - Cyberspace Consultants", "Science, Technology, Design and Sales", "blackhat", or a more serious name like users network community support LLC, Planet Communications, or something else.

What does the alt tech landscape look like:

Messaging Apps: - Signal -- Easily the best will known end to end encrypted instant messaging service, endorsed by Edward Snowden and Elon Musk, supports e2ee VOIP and Video calls - Session -- Uses the signal encryption protocol, but was forked from signal to connect to the Oxen Service Nodes, also supports VOIP and Video Calls over Oxen Privacy Technology Foundation servers, not the decentralized array of service nodes. No personal information required to sign up. The app attempts to minimise metadata as much as possible. - Telegram -- Founded by Pavel Durov with an intense committment to free speech. He fled russia and treveled the world to make it happen. Not as secure as signal, since onlt secret chats are end to end encrypted. Lack of end to end encryption hurts those who opt in to use it as Zcash and Bitcoin mixers have taught us. - Discord (depending on who you ask) -- Is not end to end encrypted at all. Paid users get what is easily the best deal as CDNs go. Ironfisted moderation by corporate strangles free expression in the name of kissing up to apple and google along with their chinses shareholders, fosscord is community attempting to reverse enginner discord - Element - The closest app to an offical Matrix Client. Basically an end to end encrypted discord alternative once spaces launched - Rocket.chat - Not federated, but is easily self hostable and delivered as free software - Nextcloud Talk - Integrated into nextcloud as the default instant messenger, easily self hostable as part of the complete nextcloud package - SimpleX - P2P messaging app that is end to end encrypted and reqiures no personal information to sign up - GNU Jami - A hybrid P2P network for instant messaging, VOIP and Video meetings, P2P with the exception of the Identity servers that connect peers to peers - Deltachat - A chat app that uses the email address you already have, trustworthy so long as your email is trustworthy and end to end encrypted as much as standards allow - Gab Chat, an offshoot of Gab Social attempting to poach discord customers who do not like discords ironfisted corporate moderation and lack of end to end encryption, messages are deleted once 30 days after posting, much more free speech, although the full version is reserved to Gab Pro subscribers and Gab Shareholders. - Zulip, another app in the same genre of self hosted messaging apps to rocket.chat, more focused on business customers Social Media: Microblogging: - Mastodon.social and Mastodon.online - the stock mastodon experience on instances ran by the official mastodon nonprofit in germany. Its mastodon covenant restricts free speech in favor of pro left pro democrat pro establishment talking points. The parallel economies developing in the fediverse has caused a left wing echo chamber of sorts, but at least they don't wreck you life over trivial bullshit like happened on twitter pre elon musk era. - social.vivaldi.net - also part of the mastodon covenant, in addition promotion of cryptocurrencies or NFTs is not allowed, restricting free speech further, hosted by Vivaldi Technologies in Iceland and moderated by the Vivaldi employees and volunteers. Also developed a left wing echo chamber like mastodon.social and mastodon.online, but its closer proximity to computers and technology releated mastodon servers on the activitypub network makes hanging around worthwhile. - Truth Social - Almost the polar opposite of Mastodon, but based on Mastodon and SoapBox so the Truth Social source code is publically available under the GNU AGPL v3 or later. Pretty much a trump echo chamber, but worth it to hear a politically important presidential candidate speak before the MSM blasts out their opinion on what Trump actually said. Lots of high energy and enthusiasm for Trump and Maga, Duh! - Gettr, was largely competing with Parler and was the sole survivor of the 'hey trump pick me pick me' war when trump announced truth social. Has a tiktok style feed called Gtok and a referral system to pull people in. Unlike Truth Social it is connected to the rest of the activitypub network to the degree that the mastodon covenent hasn't defederated it. - Gab, The OG alt tech microblogging site founded by Andrew Torba, a self proclaimed evangelical christian and gun nut who was fed up with silicon valley. Now it is also a chat app, an AI image generator via its Gab Art bot, a payment processor after they were cut off from the finincial system and activly solicits private equity from its customers through the 2012 jobs act up to 1.02 million a year last time I checked instead of through private equity firms and outside investment. - Brighteon.social, Pretty much mastodon with a brighteon theme that makes money by shilling alternative health books and pushing signup to brighteon the video sharing site on those who cannot make it through the application process. - Mozilla.social - Looks to be a pretty normal mastodon server run by Mozilla, still invite only and Mozilla is too bogged down by social media safety, user research and beaurcracy to launch immediately like any individual or small business can do without these things. They are more than perfectly capable of handling the bandwidth too, so I think they are stalling on purpose to pump up hype for mozilla social artificially, basically the clubhouse strategy. - Nostr Protocol, Nostr stand for notes and other stuff through relays. It is neither federated like mastodon or P2P like polycentric. There are two types of nodes in the Nostr protocol, transmitters and relays for lack of a better term. Transmitters are the clients that upload content to the Nostr network, unlike mastodon they do not connect to just any one relay, but as many of them as the customer specifies in the configuration, users do not have a fixed homeserver like Activitypub and Matrix since a nostr keypair consists of a username and a keypair seperate from the relays. All relays foreward all Nostr messages they recieve to every relay they know the location of by default unless they are configured with a blacklist of certian node urls and identities is present. This makes nostr far more censorship resistant than mastodon by default. Anti spam mechanisms include proof of work and pay to post. (not much, like 1 cent per post at tops, which is what the Nostr Specification contributors recommend). - Polycentric, Polycentric is another attempt by FUTO at a P2P microblogging site in the form of a web app. It is free software and anyone can fork it and use it on their own web server. I do not know how it will play out since it is public beta quality software and the protocol is subject to change as it evolves towards a stable release. It would be foolish to from a concrete opinon on polycentric at this time but its corporate backing by the FUTO organzition is a green flag in terms of long term success. Louis Rossman, longtime right to repair adovocate works at Futo, which has handed a legendary Grant to Ian Clarke's new Freenet Project, in addition to MicroG, the Repair Preservation Group, the Signal Foundation, the Knoledge Standards Foundation, both Calyx OS and Graphene OS, the BeagleBoard project that makes neat single board computers, the Conduit Matrix homeserver and the Tor Project, so polycentric is in good company. - Pixelfed, although less well known than mastodon, pixelfed is essentially for instagram what mastodon is to twitter. It is very similar to instagram but with the powerful network effects of federation. You create an account with an instance and use it to post and reply to images and gifs, rather than text being the main focal point of interaction, but without any degeneracy such as instagram style filters or photoshop like effects, sorry, you will have work harder than that to game the system with egirl thirst traps, lol. - Minds, Minds is a microblogging site, but it is also a Matrix Homeserver and pays its content creators in the minds ERC-20 token, but paying minds users have more options to cash out. Minds does host a wide arraw of content, including that outside of acceptable political discourse, to which the minds founders responded that they wish to deradicalize people through open discourse and that deplatforming in fact leads to more radicialization, not less. It too also raises money from equity crowdfunding and worryingly through private equity. It is easily one of the more well rounded alt tech platforms on this list, especially when compared to truth social. Minds offers a referral program even more generous than Mega, which is well known for their referral bonus of 20%. Minds offer 45% of all sales your refer people to on the platform, and 5% of what each person you refer earns in addition to 5% of what any content creator you refer earns in superminds, memberships and tips.

Email Services: - Protonmail - One of the original email services to market to a privacy concious audience and to prove that people a are willing to pay for a quality service. I do, I paid about 190 dollars for the complete protonunlimited package on their annaversary sale, best email service I ever used. It has been recommended by the un on multiple occasions along with signal messenger, especially when the military junta overran the legitimate government in myanmar that they themselves helped from. The EU also recommends protonmail for its employees along with signal, despite the fact that they are trying to destroy the privacy these services provide with their slippery slope chatcontrol proposal. Their free tier allows for one protonvpn connection at a time to their free servers in the USA, the Netherlands and Japan, 1 GB of storage to share across all protonmail services so long as you complete three tasks, 1 calender and 1 email address. - Tutanota Secure Email - Tutanota is one of the mail competitors to protonmail. They use their own encryption protocol using AES-128, RSA-2048 and their own encryption system not based on Pretty Good Privacy, Secure Multipurpose Internet Mail Extentions or Privacy Enhanced Mail. They offer 1 GB for your inbox, 1 email address, 1 calender and a very simple and intuitive Desktop App. They use one codebase for the Tutanota for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, IOS and the web app. I really wish they used Tauri to not waste my resouces like discord, element, IPFS desktop and the usual suspects. There is absolutely no good reason to run an entire instance of chromium and NodeJS for each and every packaged javascript app on my computer. Tauri uses the web browser you already have as its javascript runtime and is written in Rust and only takes up a few megabytes of storage space on its own. - Mailfence Secure Email - Mailfence email is a PGP encrypted webmail provider like protonmail. ALthough I supports IMAPS, POPS, and SMTPS out of the box on premium plans without a dedicated bridge app like protonmail, although it does not posess the censorship resistance that proton bridge allows for with its alternative routing feature, nor does it have an onion site for the web app like protonmail. Sad! It offers 500 megabytes for your inbox and 500 megabytes on your own document server hosted by mailfence. You can also get up to 225 gigabytes for 29 euros a month, 60 GB for your inbox and 165 GB for your document server. The Ultra plan also donates 15% of your subscription to the EFF and ERDI and another 15% to the Mozilla Thunderbird project of you sign up for a premium plan through Mozilla Thunderbird. Its interface is clean and simple while allowing you to add your third party email accounts to the webmail client. Unlike protonmail and tutanota it is not free software, but you can still inspect the obfuscated javascript running in your browser and the Android Runtime bytecode in the android app. They also now have an IOS app too. Unlike Protonmail and Tutanota Mailfence also supports Microsoft ActiveSync 356 in the paid plans as well as IMAPS, POPS and SMTPS. - Lavabit Secure Email - Although I have not used Lavabit personally because there is no free plan to try before I buy, I have mad respect for Ladar Levison who I consider to be the total Gigachad of the email industry for shutting down his own servers and closing the company rather than hand over the TLS keys for the entire website to the NSA over one suspect, which I totally believe to be Edward Snowden due to the fact that he endorsed Lavabit in the past. He then worked on his own all encompassing secure email protocol called the Dark Internet Mail Enviroment before settling on the June 2018 revision of the protocol, which is backwards compatible with PGP, S/MIME, SMTPS, POP3S, IMAP4S and traditional email protocols on the first two security levels, key escro and low security mode, which holds the password protected encryption keys on the email server in the ciphertext form, while level 3, paranoid mode does not support webmail at all and does not hold any keys of any kind on the server while supporting DIME only, and its Dark Mail Transfer Protocol and Dark Mail Access Protocol and its own Dark Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions. It costs $30 dollars a month for 5GB of storage space, end to end dime encryption, official customer support and a 64 megabyte attachment limit or $60 dollars a month for $20 for storage space, end to end dime encryption, official customer support and a 128 megabyte attachment limit, arguably one of the largest I have seen so far in the email business, with few going beyond the standard 25 megabyte attachment limit. I wish they had a free plan with 1.25 of storage, a 32 megabyte attachment limit, end to end dime encryption and without the key escro mode to discourage corporate use with or without customer support to try before I buy. 1.25 * 4 = 5, 5 * 4 = 20, 128 / 2 = 64, 64 / 2 = 32 -- makes perfect sense in how their pricing system goes. - Vivaldi Community Mail Server and Roundcube webmail client, this is a completely free email server and webmail app provided by the vivaldi community, which also provides a mastodon server and your own yourusername.vivaldi.net subdomain for use with wordpress, in addition to the vivaldi browser specific services to sync your vivaldi browser in the encrypted form only, the vivaldi browser will not upload anything to the sync server unless you give it a seperate encryption password for use with the standard chromium sync password protected end to end encryption system. Although Vivaldi.net email is not marketed as a secure email service, because it uses roundcube as its webmail client it officially supports openPGP either with RSA or Elliptic curve cryptography since the roundcube project officially supports PGP in the default distribution, and vivaldi.net uses pretty much stock roundcube save for integration with their own oauth2 solution and the rest of vivaldi.net. Note that your username you sign up with will be your *.vivaldi.net subdomain, social.vivaldi.net mastodon handle and email address, so choose carefully and make sure it sounds good as an personal email address, mastodon handle, subdomain @ vivaldi.net, username in the vivaldi forums and as a OP username for uploading browser themes. - What about fastmail or hushmail, You mean glow in the dark honeypots?

Virtual Private Networks: - ProtonVPN, Easily one of the very best deals in terms of utility for 4.99 euros a month for a two year subscription or 9.99 euros a month for a monthly subscription. Although by far the best deal is Proton Unlimited or Proton Family at 7.99 euros a month for a two year subscription or 12.99 euros a month for a monthly subscription or 19.99 a month for the two year subscription or 29.99 a month for the monthly subscription. Protonunlimted includes everything in protonvpn plus and 500GB of storage across all proton services in addition to the premium tier for each of those services. ProtonVPN plus includes 10 VPN connections at once, dual hop via their secure core exit nodes, NetShield to block ads, trackers and malware, in addition to dedicated servers hosted by safe hosting providers and jurisdictions for P2P file sharing and servers with close proximity to Tor Guard nodes for connecting to Tor, although you can do so through any server even on the free plan via the official Tor Browser, and by extenion the official Tor Expert bundle and by extension DarkMX and Onionshare. ProtonVPN and its corporate entity is under swiss jurisdiction. - Mullvad VPN, Mullvad VPN is by far one of the oldest and most reputable VPN companies in terms of offering secure VPN services. They have one monthly fee for any length of time you choose to pay in advance, either by credit, check or debit card, prepaid debit card, prepaid check card, bitcoin, monero, cash in an envelope through the mail, direct bank wire transfer, disposable credit card service, and they do not block proxy services who will take your money and pay for your mullvad subscription and pay for it in their name. No personal information is required to sign up and they will generate a one time code that you then top off with you preferred payment menthod. They have a much larger network and even rent out their infrastructure to other VPN companies like Mozilla. Mullvad supports wireguard and OpenVPN through their official desktop app for WIndowx Mac and Linux, and their IOS and Android apps, which are free software. I do not use them personally, at least not yet although they also have a Tor Hidden Service that you can use to pay without revealing your real IP Address. They pride themselves on being just a VPN, but they are removing support for port forewarding, so look elsewhere if you need that, Both protonvpn and IVPN support this however. - IVPN, IVPN is very similar to Mullvad VPN, except they are headquarterd in Gilbatrar and not Sweden. They have a very similar signup prodecure to Mullvad, except they they have two paid options, IVPN standard or IVPN Pro, for $140 for three years or $220 for three years respectively, with support for two simultaneous connections and seven simultaneous connections respectively. Both subscriptions support their anti-tracker feature but only the Pro subscription supports multi-hop. Like Mullvad VPN IVPN supports cash, Monero and Bitcoin payments for increased privacy, private DNS servers like ProtonVPN Plus, and Killswitch/Obfuscation functionality if the underlying protocol supports them. They support plastic swiper cards and paypal for fiat payments and bitcoin lightning if you do not want to use regular bitcoin. There are multiple audits on IVPN that you should read before you place your full trust in them, as you should with any VPN service. - CloudFlare Warp - CloudFlare Warp is technically a VPN since it uses Wireguard to tunnel traffic to local cloudflare servers to change your ISP to Cloudflare. It easilt has the best free plan available of any of these services, with a CloudFlare Warp+ available for free in 1GB installments for referring people to CloudFlare Warp or CloudFlare Warp+ Unlimited available for $4.99 a month through the mobile app, although it carries to every device on your ZK license key for up to five simulltanious connections at once in addition to extra servers specially set up for cloudflare Warp+. The main advantage is that it speeds up your internet connection by moving your physical IP address as close as possible to CloudFlare CDN servers in addition to their other services. Only the CloudFlare Warp Unlimited has access to unlimited bandwidth as its name suggests. Consider it secondry to another VPN service. - Psiphon, Psiphon is a VPN services focused on censorship resistance over speed and protocol support. The free plan requires no account to sign up but is limited to 2Mb/s per device, you can use it on as many devices you want due to the fact that no accounts are required to use the free tier. Although a premium tier is offered in two subscriptions, a basic paid plan providing up to 5Mb/s with unrestricted ports and an unlimited plan providing unlimited speed with unrestricted ports for $4.99 a month and $9.99 a month respectively in addition to the unlimited time pass at 7 days for $2.99, 30 days for $9.99 or 360 days for $69.99 respectively. - Mozilla VPN, Mozilla VPN uses Mullvad infrastructure and provides 500 servers around the world. I myself do not consider it worth it unless bundle it with Mozilla Relay Plus, which grants you unlimited email aliases at the mozmail email server and a second phone number that you can rotate that forwards to your real phone number to sign up for websites without giving out your real phone number that is likely registered to your real name. I only wish that they would create a new bundle called Mozilla+ with Mozilla Relay Paid, Mozilla VPN and Mozilla Developer Network Plus, Pocket Premuium, and the ability to moniter more than 5 email addresses in firefox moniter. I wish firefox moniter could moniter Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, GoG, Steam, Xbox, Nintendo, Playstation, Epic Games Store, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Disney+, CuriousiyStream, Nebula, Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, Instagram/Threads, Proton, Tutanota, Mailfence, Vivaldi Community, Oracle, Oracle Cloud, Google Cloud, Google Developer, Apple Developer, Microsoft Developer, Amazon Developer, Redhat, Github, Gitlab, Codeberg, Fedora Account, Ubuntu One, Discourse Forum accounts, and other online accounts on their own seperate from your email address by integrating into their API, that I would be willing to pay for at $9.99 a month, $99.99 a year, $225 bianually or $325 triannually. - Brave VPN, Brave VPN is hosted on Gaurdian VPN infrastructure and is integrated into the Brave Browser on Desktop, IOS and Android. The official Guardian VPN app only works on Crapple iShits and Fuckbooks, but Brave VPN has runs on any platform that Brave runs on. Brave Software is simply the middleman between the payment processor and the app store, the app store is the payment processor and brave sends the money to Guardian VPN and pockets the difference. The app store only knows you are paying $9.99 a month or $99.99 to Brave Software as an in app purchase and all Guardian VPN knows is that Brave Software is sending them a bulk payment for X number of VPN access credentials. I have not used guardian VPN but there is no way Guardian VPN and firewall could be very different from ProtonVPN Plus and Netshield enabled. - Opera VPN, Although Opera VPN is not actually a VPN, but instead an Opera and Opera Mini specific web proxy run by Opera Software AS it is still good enough for some light incognito browsing and the fact that it is a web proxy allows you to multi hop to Opera Software's IP address from the VPN connection you already have similar to the ProtonVPN browser extension for Chrome, Firefox, Chrome OS and Android TV as well as their forks and derivitives where the web browser connects to a seperate IP address than rest of the computer through the Chrome or Firefox's seperate VPN/Proxy API. Opera VPN Pro costs at the time of writing this 3.39 euros per month or 40.68 per year for a one year subscription, which is as far as you can pay in advance for Opera VPN Pro, if you do not pay in advance it costs 6.79 euros a month. According to the Privacy Policy the VPN servers are not owned by Opera Software AS but by a third party, probably another VPN company that whitelabels their infrastructure for other companies like Opera that want to offer a VPN service but don't want any of the hassle or liability of maintaining VPN servers and defending them in court. - RiseUP VPN, RiseUp VPN is unique on this list because it is a public access VPN server run by a nonprofit that specializes in providing services to activists around the world. They own their own IP addresses and do not have a paid plan, but they solicit donations and state that the VPN service costs around $60 a year including paying for those who do not donate. It is a standard VPN service that uses BitMask as its VPN app on mobile on desktop. Bitmask is also the app used by Calyx VPN and Lavabit Web Proxy, hosted by the Calyx Institute and Lavabit email service respectively. BitMask is made by the Leap Encryption Access Project, which is a charitable open source effort dedicated to helping nonprofits like RiseUp and Calyx Institute run their own public access VPN infrastructure without much hassle. The official BitMask app, not the RiseUp, Lavabit or Calyx Institute fork supports RiseUp and Calyx institute servers because they only include the certificates of properly vetted nonprofits by default. I recommend the offical bitmask app wherever possible instead for the RiseUp or Calyx fork for being more up to date. Everyhing I said here applies to Calyx VPN too, except that RiseUp has a few more locations that Calyx, althougth both of the offer a server in New York. Lavabit Encrypted Proxy only offers a server in Texas where their servers are located.

Cloud Storage:

• Mega Drive: In terms of alt tech cloud storage Mega is an obvious candidate since it markets itself as "the privacy company" and has supported zero knowledge end to end encryption on all files stored on its servers way before it was cool. The Mega free plan supports up to 20 gigabytes of storage, but you can increase that to 30GB by installing the mobile and desktop apps and inviting you friends and family to mega, or you alternate email addresses. Wink Wink !) They also have a very generous referral program where if you refer someone to mega, you get 20% of the paid subscription they end up purchasing, even if they already have a free account so long as they do you through your link. Unlike Protonmail and Tutanota which only gift you up to $90 in account credits max, Mega lets you cash out all the way and you get their first year of subscriptions or their first payment if they pay in advance longer than a year. Overall a great service although I disagree with their choice of 2048 bit RSA, I think they should upgrade to Crystals-Kyber-1024(RSA-4096(file)) or Crystals-Kyber-1024(NTRU-4096(file)) at minimum. I am happy that they do not use elliptic curve cryptography, but if they did I would never use a size smaller than 256 bits, and only NIST-P521 and NIST-B571 for keypairs and ECDSA-8192 for signatures.
• Proton Drive, Proton Drive is much more secure than Mega Cloud Storage in terms of encryption with RSA-4096 and all files being padded or split into 4 Megabyte chunks prior to upload to make all files look the same on Proton AG's servers. I use Proton Drive with my protonunlimited subscription and never had a problem. The Desktop app supports Windows and the mobile app runs on IOS and Android, although I wish it could upload more than 250 files concurrently or support automatic sync. If the app had the permission to change system settings on android, then it could also sync your configuration in the android settings app and restore it as well like google drive. On android, for a complete sync any cloud storage app access to your camera, microphone, phone, music and audio, photos and videos, text messages, system settings and if possible appdata for a complete back up of your files, system settings, call history, voicemails, text messages, music and podcast library, camera roll and photo library, meme folder, app data and list of installed apps. Then proton drive only requests notifications on android and nothing else, which is also a selling point.
• Nextcloud, Nextcloud is the obvious solution for rolling your own cloud. Nextcloud hub supports nextcloud drive, nextcloud chat, nextcloud groupware and webmail, nextcloud office. All of this is fre software under the GNU affero GPL v3. Nextcloud Hub 6 has added support for a local on premises AI assistant as well. Nextcloud will work with just about any cloud provider like incognet, oracle cloud, google cloud, aws, linode/akamai, vulkr, digitalocean, Blackhost, Shinjiru, Onionhost, Alexhost or other hosting provider. pay for bulletproof hosting like Incognet, Rumble cloud services, Blackhost, Shinjiru, Alexhost or some other provider, just make sure they do not openly market to criminals or you might wake up to find your NextCloud drive gone the next day. NextCloud supports end to end encryption out of thw box with a single switch to enable it just like Mega and Proton Drive.
• Mailfence Document server, Mailfence document server is just a networked drive over the internet, anything that applies to networked remote drives applies to Mailfence document server too. Always encrypt your files before uploading because mailfence certanly doesn't.
• Download.ru, Download.ru is a website offering file sharing with 10GB free of charge with no premium plan. I do not know who is running it but it is DMCA resistant due to the fact it is based in russia. If you are downloading the legenday Windows MGMT Toolkit then you get it from download.ru because microsoft hates it when ordinary people have access to easy to use Windows ISO configuration tools. Not end to end encrypted so do not upload any personal information or encrypt it first. It also offers a webdav networked drive just like mailfence, but no email.

Video Sharing sites: - Bitchute, Bitchute is a video sharing site headquartered in the UK run by free speech absoluteists. They have criticised self proclaimed free speech absoluteist elon musk on multiple occasions the latest being his support of #bantheadl in their blog post "#bantheadl, says no free speech absoluteist ever." They use webtorrent as their content distribution network like peertube, but they do not share webtorrent infohashes over activitypub like Peertube, which they should at least make an honest attempt to be peertube compatible, since that would make their video library larger and the rest of the peertube federation as well. If they get defederated they can just keep mirroring the rest of peertube while the peertube federation shoots itself in the foot by refusing the mirror Bitchute's massive video library. Defederation does not actually block the ability to recieve content from the rest of the federation unless special configs are used, but if that happens just spin up a bunch of proxy mastodon or peertube instances and get your content from those. - Rumble, Rumble is as close as youtube to youtube as it gets in the alt tech ecosystem, although their main product is rumble.com the video sharing site they also rent out their self deployed infrasctructure to other companies. They do not use webtorrent or IPFS as a cdn, rather they use the traditional cdn instead. This makes rumble more expensive to operate than Peertube, Bitchute or Dlive or other services that use IPFS or Bittorrent/Webtorrent as a CDN. This is because tney have to transmit a copy to everyone watching the video, while Peertube, Bitchute, Dlive etc only have to transmit a copy to the peers that are directly connected, once the maximum bandwidth is reached any other viewers get the video from the Webtorrent or IPFS peers. This makes federation easier since large files only need one host, and if a video goes mega viral it does not take down the site with it. - Peertube, Peertube is what mastodon is to twitter and pixelfed is to instagram, it is a GNU AGPL v3 licensed video sharing app developed by Chocobozzz from france and supported by framasoft, you can deploy it easily on your own server. The interface is not as sophisticated as bitchute or youtube but it displays videos based on popularity, most recently uploaded, most liked, and other directly measurable metrics, which to its primary audience is a feature, not an bug. Like Bitchute, Peertube uses webtorrent as its CDN, so it can scale up worldwide very quickly and scale down just as quickly. - Dlive, Dlive is a livestreaming site that uses the Tron blockchain for some of its functions. Its parent company is Rainberry INC, which is also behind the Utorrent and Bittorrent clients for the Bittorrent network, the Tron based Bittorrent token used to purchase priority download speed from peers and the Bittorrent File System, an alternative to the Interplantary File System. It still holds to much of its founding free speech principles, but it does the best is can considering it has a parent company. - Brighteon, Brighteon is a more curated video sharing site with a focus on certian genres of content. It can be best compared to a public broadcasting network that operates over the internet and not cable tv that hosts user generated content. Brighteon was founded by an alternative health entrepreneur who monitizes the site by selling neutracuticals and various other alternative health creams, pills and homeopathic remedies in addition to books about alternative health subjects and other right wing political discourse. I would not consider this site dedicated to free speech as much as the other ones on this list because they openly admit to being right wing and curating their homepage in accordance with their right wing, conservatarian, alternative health, shockjocky company values. At least the comments sections have a dedication to free speech, but there are better video sharinb sites out there as far as I can tell. - Gab TV, Gab TV is a video sharing site that is run by Gab AI in addition to Gab social and Gab Chat. Although it is free with ads to watch, you need to pay for gab pro to upload videos and get paid for uploading them. Gab TV is one of few sites other than youtube where you get paid when people watch your videos, although the revenue stream is more stable for content creators since their paycheck comes both from Gab AI's own ad network and Gab Pro subscriptions, and because a larger porportion to Gab's userbase are paying users than on youtube, that income is more reliable in the event of an adpocalipse. - Triller, Triller is the only major alt-tech site targeting the tiktok tiktik format except for Gettr and their Gtok. It is primaraly focused on short videos, reactiongifs and short attention spans. Not my cup of tea but I am glad it exists.

Image sharing websites: - Pixelfed, obviously - Wikimedia commons, totally free so long as you agree to license your images into the creative commons, I recommend the CC-BY-SA 4.0 International for music, podcasts, audio, videos, vlogs, movies, video essays, written works, books, essays, blog posts and anything else that is copyrightable subject matter that is not source or object code. For source or object code I recommend the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 or later. Beware of the wikipedia administration - IPFS, if the platform supports it - Use any of the alt tech social networks I listed as an image host. Post the image to your meme page then link to it elsewhere - Mega.io, upload the image to your cloud drive and make it public, then link to it - Proton Drive, upload your image, then make it public and link to the raw file, not the protondrive download page - your own server, duh - Webtorrent, if the platform support it

Forums: - Patriots.win, Patriots.win is the continuation of the r/thedonald after reddit all but banned them, after the migration to thedonald.win, now patriots.win, reddit banned them anyway. Patriots.win uses the old reddit codebase which reddit themselves no longer maintain, but the public archive is still avaiable for you to fork to your hearts content. - forum.vivaldi.net, the vivaldi.forum is mainly focused on the vivaldi browser and browser development in general, but there are sections for regular non poltical chatter and tech related discussion. Keep your politics out if you want to stay, social.vivaldi.net is more lenient but so not straw too far from approved talking points and regime narratives if you want to keep your account. - zsync.xyz, a forum that attempts to reward quality content by charging a very small amount of money per upvote, this incentivises people to conserve their upvotees and makes it harder to get upvotes and raising the minimum standards for quality content. Ultimately a great idea that I think ultimately limits growth due to the charging of money to upvote. - linen forum engine, Linen forum engine is kind of unique in that it looks and feels like discord or slack but is a web forum first and formost than can be indexed by search engines. It is licensed under the GNU Affero GPL v3 and is designed to be as small as possible in terms of file size, async first with minimla dependecies. For further bandwidth savings it supports webpack for serve the forum as a compressed archive if the browser supports it. - phpBB, phpBB is one of the longest running actively maintained forum engines, if none of these options fit what you need to do, then use phpBB - old reddit source code, reddit has stopped maintaining the old reddit source code, but that does not mean it is no usable. You can download it from the public archive and run it on your own server, consider merging any of the maintainence patches patriots.win has made or the inactive voat patches. Sadly the new reddit UI is not free software, but who cares, old reddit was better in every way, and way less annoying too. - basementcommunity.com, basementcommunity.com is a masterclass in getting forum asthetics right, too bad it is not released as free software, but we can still study the asthetic and design choices and replicate them. - Discourse is one of the more popular forums available as free software. It is used by the Fedora Community Forums, the vivaldi community forums, the brave community forums, the torproject forums, the signalusers forums, framework community forums, the f-droid forums to great success and you can use it too.

P2P networks:

• Bittorrent, Bittorrent is easily the most popular P2P network at this point and multiple implementations are available, with the unofficial offical one being libtorrent, whic is written in C++ with official python bindings. Bittorrent v1 is insecure and I recommend bittorrent v2 or at least a hybrid torrent if you have to. Downloading throgh bittorrent your Libreoffice installers, Linux ISOs and your copyright free torrents (Wink Wink! ;) is much faster than downloading through http mirrors and much more resiliant too. Be sure to be polite and seed what you downloaded for a while. a seeding ratio of 5.0 is considered polite by pretty much every private tracker, so go with that number. Bittorrent has been ported to javascript and webtrc through the MIT/Expat licensed Webtorrent javascript library and desktop app. More Bittorrent clients than ever support webtorrent as well, so the Webtorrent Desktop is not necessry if your preferred client supports webtorrent, which is easier than ever now with libtorrent now that WebRTC has been ported beyond javascript. Bittorrent clients:
  • Qbittorrent
  • Frostwire (a direct decendant of limewire pirate edition, which was a reimplementation of limewire pro created after limewire unironically cracked down on downloading limewire pro through limewire, although frostwire no longer supports gnutella) (frostwire plus is available on android, but it is proprietary adware, although the source code is under the Apache 2.0 license, so forking it to remove the adware is possible.
  • LibreTorrent (one of the few options for torrenting on android other than Bittorrent frostwire plus, Utorrent and Tixati when KH gets around to porting it)
  • Tribler (expands on the Bittorrent protocol with P2P onion routing, a P2P index of torrent files with the ability to create channels and a P2P search engine)
  • Tixati (proprietary) (expands on the bittorrent protocol with P2P groupchats)
  • Utorrent (proprietary) (pretty much the same as the bittorrent branded client after Rainberry INC aquired Utorrent)
  • Bittorrent (the offical Bittorrent client and yet the worst one, adware, spyware and it shills Cyberghost VPN)
  • Webtorrent Desktop (webtorrent desktop is a desktop app that bridges the webtorrent and Bittorrent protocols) IPFS, IPFS is the modern protocol inspired by Bittorrent, Kademelia and Git, but is its own thing entirely. The official IPFS daemons are writtin in golang and javascript and are referred to as Kubo and Helia respectively. Much of IPFS other than the Bittorrent inspired parts and the git inspired IPNS which allows for updates with distinct version numbers has been modularized out into LibP2P for other projects to use. go-ethereum and Locutus (now Freenet) make use of LibP2P. Associated with the IPFS project is the Filecoin project, of which the official go implementation is codenamed lotus. Filecoin is a novel utiluty token running on its own blockchain that is used to pay IPFS daemons for storage space with no centralized pinning authority. IPFS offically supports pinning, which is the IFPS way of autoseeding files based on commands from a webserver like RSS feeds are used in bittorrent. It makes a better CDN than webtorrent because the IPFS protocol is designed to be used as such. To use it as CDN run go-ipfs on your server and js-ipfs on your webpage, then link to the js-ipfs node in your use of external images. Anyone with the IPFS companion browser extension has no use for js-ipfs in the webpage, so make an honest effort to detect IPFS companion and do not send js-ipfs in favor of IPFS companion instead. IPFS companion either uses its own js-ipfs API or go-IPFS. go-IPFS has a detailed command line if you don't want to use a GUI like IPFS Desktop. It is exceptionally easy to compile go-ipfs with the built in go-install command, so build fromn the latest stable source if you want the best peformance. js-ipfs can be run through a javascript obfuscator to make it smaller and faster, which I recommend for each of the scripts you use to be kind to your readers. IPFS Clients and Related software:
  • IPFS Desktop (the offical IFPS desktop app, can be used for file sharing and with IPFS companion)
  • IPFS Cluster (manages IPFS swarms remotely)
  • IPFS companion (integrated IPFS into your browser)
  • dweb.link (a remote IPFS gateway, used to be the default setting for IPFS desktop)
  • ipfs.io IPFS gateway (now the offical IPFS gateway
  • cloudflare-ipfs.com (the Cloudflare IPFS gateway)
  • Agregore (an IPFS focused web browser and GUI)
  • orbitchat (a simple chat app using IPFS as its CDN and OrbitDB as its backed)
  • orbitDB (one of the main solutions for using IPFS as a serverless P2P database)
  • Skiff (a service hosted as free software that providing document editing, email, cloud storage and groupware that is end to end encrypted that uses IPFS as the backend, can try it for free but you must use your own IPFS node) Freenet, there are two versions of freenet, the new freenet codenamed locutus that uses a subscription based datastore and supports smart contracts complied to webassembly from Assemblyscript or Rust, which is the language locutus is written in. There is also Freenet Classic, which does not support smart contracts and uses a datastore that caches any blocks that it forewards to those who request them or whom the node operator requests himself. This grants anonymity by plausible deniability and makes it difficult to trace who is downloading what. However the Freenet Classic developers resigned in protest and relaunched under the Hyphanet. Depending on who you think is right Freenet Classic and Hyphanet are pretty much interchangable at this point. Freenet nodes:
  • Fred (freenet classic written in java)
  • Locutus (freenet, sometimes called freenet 2023 written in rust and webassembly)
  • FCON (stand for freenet classic opennet, although not declared dead it has not been updated in to long it pretty much is, a protest fork of freenet 0.5 in response to the new routing algorithm in freenet 0.7 that ther developers thought compromised anonymity with freenet nodes having freenet node IDs for the first time to accomidate a new darknet friend to friend mode, which the FCON developers didn't think was worth the new freenet node IDs considering the realities of P2P networks and the type of people who use them)
  • there have been a few attempts to rewrite fred in other languages, but non of them have reached a usable state Fopnu (A novel P2P network created by Kevin Hearn, the guy behind WinMX and Tixati. It uses a pure UDP mesh network, but the particulars of the algorithm are proprietary and not well known, although Kevin Hearn has a very good reputation and a lot of goodwill in the world of P2P. Hopefully he eventually releases it as free software but the proprietary nature is how he keeps the network safe from copyright trolls. It has a P2P search engine that advertises "no proxying of other user's searches."

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. Frank Herbert, Dune"