I never imagined the original post would go so viral and be seen by +6M people. But I guess it shows there’s real momentum — and the perfect time to finally escape big tech’s grip.
I went through hundreds of reposts of the image and took in feedback from community comments. I’ve replaced USA-centralized apps like Brave and Bluesky with more open alternatives, and added self-hosting indicators.
As many of you recommended, I’ve also created an online version with descriptions that we can constantly update and improve.
Drop a comment if you have suggestions for a better alternative, improved description, or a feature for the site. Let’s break free together!
As with all impromptu lists, this one is pretty flawed. For example, as much as I love it, lineageOS is not useful for “digital independence” in any meaningful sense, since it’s just a more cleaned up version of android. Or PeerTube, which can’t really be considered a realistic alternative to yt. It’s fine in itself, but it’s so small and so hard to scale that you might just be better off giving up the yt format altogether. And then there’s Thunderbird. I love it but it’s a CLIENT, you’ll still need a mail provider.
LineageOS uses microG which does mock some GSF API and reduce metadata sent through to the rest. GrapheneOS could be a better alternative but there isn’t enough second hand Pixels available for everyone.
Peertube is perfectly fine and we should start using it and encourage creators to move to an instance
I have no idea how to use PeerTube. Installed it on my phone, found no interesting videos to watch, at all. I wonder how would it scale, like how easy/hard would it be to find videos I’m interested in.
Peertube is decentralized like Lemmy. I think you have to add instances you want to browse from
LineageOS is worse than that. You can’t have it and also have local security as you cannot lock your phone bootloader with an unsigned image. You can’t protect yourself from anyone with physical access to the phone.
Not to mention the fact that a bunch of banking apps won’t work on LineageOS. You can try magisk as a workaround for some, but others just won’t.
So the moment you get lineage anyone with physical access can install bootloader things in your phone? Eg cerberus?
Can install any software