Alternative, or ‘alt-tech’, has evolved among disaffected users - or former users - of the Silicon Valley social media monopoly, to describe a number of services formed in protest to their heavy censorship, which are generally thought to provide a ‘safe haven’ of dissenting ideas with a familiar enough user experience to the hegemons. Eventually, the term entered the parlance of overpaid hack reporters and other NATO assets to denote any online community that dares to harbour Europeans without a sufficient complex of self-hatred.
The bastardisation of this term on both sides (which seems to have been evident from the moment it was coined) obscures the reality of the alt-tech situation: the vast majority of these platforms are centralised, WWW-based services with precisely the same financial dependencies and legal imperatives as Alphabet, Facebook and Twitter. ‘Alt-tech’ therefore, is a hollow branding term for those who claim to provide safety from the abuses of Silicon Valley, and a characteristically-shallow attack on anti-liberal speech on the part of the media, and any use of the term serves to promote confusion and misinformation about our situation.
The relevance of the necessary architecture of most online services seems to have finally caught up with MSM, and a certain article in The Washington Post offers one view of the Internet service stack (compared to, say, the OSI model) that the majority of publishing, commerce and processing mediums we are familiar with, rely upon - as well as a good enough reference to contrast alt-tech platforms with those that actually offer resilient functionality. When I describe a service as ‘centralised’, they typically have at least 3 of the 5 dependencies of the client-server stack described therein, and in most cases, they depend on all 5.
Also note one line in that article: “Anti-hate groups, including Change the Terms and the Anti-Defamation League, have increased the pressure up and down the stack”. This is a tacit acknowledgement of the kind I gave right before 8chan was shut down in 2019, that not only is the continued reliance upon each of these services a comforting yet dated myth for potential dissidents, but that the steady destruction of all their illusions of security can be accelerated by pitting alt-tech and establishment forces against one another - the methodical application of which I refer to as the ‘Siege’ of the Web.
NatSec presence in development of software and the managing of social networks is now taken for many as a given. Between the PSYWAR, KSA and FBI officers overseeing Twitter, the Altantic Council officials (or even Mossad child-traffickers) present in Reddit, and military / IC investment into FAGMAN, Silicon Valley and tech startups in general (see ISGP on Sun Valley and ‘liberal CIA’) - state-directed ‘innovation’, and the state-directed censorship which follows it, is hard to miss. However, the presence of this surveillance state influence in ‘alternative’ or ‘independent’ media, marketed for its ‘privacy’, seems to be a third rail topic.
Per The Webless Initiative, if a site or page primarily publishing static content cannot be read on a small browser such as Lynx, then it probably isn’t worth visiting. There may be exceptions for image searches or services requiring logins, but for videos, applications like MPV and youtube-dl (or yt-dlp) will often suffice. For those which do require a login or other close engagement, it would be wise to keep an eye upon the political practices or conflicts of interest of those promising you ‘freedom’, that you may act accordingly.
What follows is a table inspired by Wikipedia’s list of ‘alt-tech’ services, along with the reasons that you should generally avoid them (or at least, not stake your security on them), and below that, lists of protocols and software that actually tend to follow a decentralised or distributed design (as well as other services that, despite being centralised, still provide valuable resources, or a nicer alternative to browsing the Web).
Agregore - Explore the distributed web
Arbore - A free and open-source file sharing application that enables you to send your pictures, documents, files to your contacts privately and without limits
galacteek - A multi-platform Qt5-based browser and content crafter for the distributed web
hydrus - A personal booru-style media tagger that can import files and tags from your hard drive and popular websites
IPFS Desktop - An unobtrusive and user-friendly desktop application for IPFS on Windows, Mac and Linux
Orion - An easy to use IPFS Desktop client
Pathephone - Completely serverless, distributed, decentralized, p2p music streaming app for your desktop
Peergos - A decentralised protocol and open-source platform for storage, social media and applications
Bisq - Buy and sell bitcoin for fiat (or other cryptocurrencies) privately and securely using Bisq’s peer-to-peer network and open-source desktop software
DeCommerce - Decentralized ecommerce platform for Web3
Monero - Private, decentralized cryptocurrency that keeps your finances confidential and secure
FreeSea - Decentralized NFT marketplace
OpenBazaar - A free online marketplace. No platform fees. No restrictions. Earn cryptocurrency
Particl - A decentralized all-in-one financial platform that protects your rights and gives you total freedom
scatter.art - Fully decentralized NFT trading
tZERO - Access to new securities
Edge - Peer-to-peer serverless infrastructure, powered by blockchain technology and built using the spare capacity all around us
Filecoin - A decentralized storage network for humanity’s most important information
Gridcoin - An open source cryptocurrency (Ticker: GRC) that rewards volunteer computing for science through the BOINC platform
Urbit - Your personal server
ActivityPub - A decentralized social networking protocol based on the ActivityStreams 2.0 data format
Aether - Open source, self-governing communities with auditable moderation and mod elections
AT Protocol - Social networking technology created by Bluesky
cabal - Experimental p2p community chat platform
FChannel - A libre, self-hostable, federated, imageboard platform that utilizes ActivityPub
The Federation - A statistics hub
Fediverse Party - Explore federated networks
Fosscord - A free open source selfhostable discord compatible chat, voice and video platform
Jitsi - More secure, more flexible, and completely free video conferencing
Kiwi Farms - Official Kiwi Farms Pleroma server
Mattermost - An open source platform for secure collaboration across the entire software development lifecycle
MediaGoblin - A free software media publishing platform that anyone can run
NiceCrew - There is no Nice… There is no crew… & WTF is a poast?
NNTPChan - A decentralized imageboard network moderated by signed message that is powered by ye old pre internet protocol known as nntp
Nostr - A simple, open protocol that enables a truly censorship-resistant and global social network
notabug - Federated fork of classic reddit UI based on gunDB
Outpoast - An outpost in the middle of nowhere
Poast - Fediverse for shitpoasters
PeerTube - Free software to take back control of your videos
Pleroma - A lightweight fediverse server
Rebased - A Fediverse backend written in Elixir
Seal Cafe - A chill & general purpose rebased instance
Session - An end-to-end encrypted messenger that minimises sensitive metadata, designed and built for people who want absolute privacy and freedom from any form of surveillance
Soapbox - Software for the next generation of social media
Tox - A new kind of instant messaging
WebFinger - Simple discovery for the web
XMPP - The universal messaging standard
yetzt - List of 500 most defederated fediverse instances
Farside - A smart redirecting gateway for various frontend services
LibRedirect - A web extension that redirects YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and other requests to alternative privacy friendly frontends and backends
Redirector - A Browser extension for Firefox and Chromium that can manually be configured to redirect links, such as YouTube to Invidious or Twitter to Nitter
4chan
/b/stats 2.0: beta edition
The /b/ Archive
4plebs
arch.b4k.co
Archive Of Sins
Archived.Moe
Desuarchive
fireden.net
Nyafuu Archive
Oldfriend Archive
scalearchive
TokyoChronos
Wakarimasen Archive
warosu
Imgur
rimgo
Instagram
Bibliogram
Inflact
Picuki
LBRY
Awesome-LBRY
Librarian
Reddit
libreddit
reveddit
teddit
Twitch
Chatterino
Twitter
Ark Threads
Nitter
Readwise
t
Thread Reader App
TWText
YouTube
CloudTube
Invidious
NSFW YouTube
Piped
Wikipedia
WikiLess
Overbite Project - Bringing gopherspace back to modern operating systems, browsers and mobile devices
Project Gemini - A new Internet protocol which is heavier than gopher, is lighter than the web, will not replace either, strives for maximum power to weight ratio, takes user privacy very seriously
Awesome Go - A curated list of awesome Go frameworks, libraries and software
Awesome Open Source - Find open source by searching, browsing and combining topics across categories and projects on GitHub
Awesome-Selfhosted - A list of Free Software network services and web applications which can be hosted on your own servers
Glowing Bear - A web client for WeeChat
i2p.rocks - i2p irc and otr with weechat
Mibbit - IRC Networks
ngIRCd - A free, portable and lightweight Internet Relay Chat server for small or private networks
Rizon Wiki - Aims to provide users with answers to their questions relating to IRC and/or Rizon
UnrealIRCd documentation wiki - An Open Source IRC Server, serving thousands of networks since 1999
cjdns - An encrypted IPv6 network using public-key cryptography for address allocation and a distributed hash table for routing
FidoNet - A world wide communications network
Freenet - A peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant and privacy-respecting publishing and communication
i2pd documentation - BitTorrent software with I2P support
Invisible Internet Project (I2P) - A fully encrypted private network layer
Lokinet - A decentralised onion router that uses Oxen service nodes as relays
mkp224o - Vanity address generator for ed25519 onion services
OpenVPN - Flexible business VPN solutions for an enterprise to secure all data communications and extend private network services while maintaining security
Tor Project - Anonymity online
WireGuard - Fast, modern, secure VPN tunnel
Collapse OS - Bootstrap post-collapse technology
GrapheneOS - A privacy and security focused mobile OS with Android app compatibility developed as a non-profit open source project
Kali Linux - The most advanced penetration testing distribution
Santoku Linux - Dedicated to mobile forensics, analysis, and security, and packaged in an easy to use, Open Source platform
Tails - A portable operating system that protects against surveillance and censorship
TempleOS - A 64 bit, non-preemptive multi-tasking, multi-cored, public domain, open source, ring-0-only, single address space, non-networked, PC operating system for recreational programming
Whonix - Software that can anonymize everything you do online
Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network - Making mesh software work for the needs of Amateur Radio Operators and emergency networks
AMSAT-UK - Radio amateur satellites
Antenna Theory - A source of knowledge for learning about and understanding antennas
AX.25 Layer 2 - A concise repository for AX.25 layer 2 design activities
AX25 Soundmodem - A multiplatform soundcard packet radio modem written by Thomas Sailer
extmodem - An AX25 open source soundcard modem
G7VRD - Rocking the world’s airwaves since 1995
GNU Radio - A free & open-source toolkit for software radio
Gqrx SDR - Open source software defined radio by Alexandru Csete OZ9AEC
HamStudy - Cutting edge amateur radio study tools
JS8Call - Software using the JS8 Digital Mode providing weak signal keyboard to keyboard messaging to Amateur Radio Operators
KiwiSDR - Wide-band SDR + GPS cape for the BeagleBone Black
Meshtastic - Open Source hiking, pilot, skiing and secure GPS mesh communicator
Miklor - Radio support & information site
Packet-radio - A way of life
QRP Labs - QRP Labs kits
RadioMasterList.com - The World best receivers and transceivers directory
The Prepared - How to manually program a BaoFeng radio
QRZ - Callsign database
The RadioReference Wiki - This is the RadioReference.com Open Reference Source, the Radio Communications Resource that any RadioReference user can edit
Signal Identification Wiki - Identify radio signals through example sounds and waterfall images
RTL-SDR.com - RTL-SDR (RTL2832U) and software defined radio news and projects
unsigned.io - Guides
W1HKJ Software - Software By W1HKJ & Associates
BitTorrent
BTDigg - DHT Search engine: free search engine for free torrent content
Corrupt-Net - BitTorrent pre and trace index
The Pirate Bay - The galaxy’s most resilient BitTorrent site
PREdb - Pre database search engine
Tribler - Privacy using our Tor-inspired onion routing
IPFS
IPFS Search
PeerTube
PeerTube Index
PeerTube Search
Sepia Search
Web
Searx - A free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from more than 70 search services
Wiby - Search Engine for the Classic Web
DTube - A full-featured video sharing website, decentralized
LBRY - A content sharing and publishing platform that is decentralized and owned by its users
Odysee - Blockchain content hosting built on the LBRY protocol
