Stopgaps and Alternatives

[laura]

(This is a wiki-style post. You can update the list by editing this post.)

Below is a wonderful list of “Google alternatives” compiled by Christian Pietsch and others.

Eventually, we want to have separate topics for each of these products/services under either the Alternatives category or the Stopgaps category so we can discuss them individually.

I’ll get on that soon, but for now, this is a Wiki post, so anyone can edit it

Huge thanks for Christian for all his hard work:

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There are several reasons why you probably do not want to share too many aspects of your life with Google: It has a near monopoly in several aspects of the Internet, and has its hands in many others: search, advertisement, calendaring, cloud storage, social media, news, e-mail, maps, online office … This stfles competition. And by using several of these, you give Google the chance to gain new insights about you by combining data from several services.

Analytics

• Piwik
• http://www.awstats.org AWStats is a logfile analyzer, so it does not require trackers or web bugs. It looks slightly dated but does its job quickly and reliably
• https://www.elastic.co ElasticSearch + LogStash + Kibana

Blogger (blogging)

Self-hosted:

• http://tiddlywiki.com (can also be hosted for free on http://tiddlyspot.com)

Calendar

Self-hosted:

• http://baikal-server.com
• https://owncloud.org
• see http://caldav.calconnect.org/implementations.html for other software
• http://sogo.nu/ (GPL webmailer + calendar server (CalDAV) + contacts server (CardDAV))
• Odoo
• Tine2.0

Cloud-hosted:

• https://www.zoho.com/calendar/
• http://www.teamup.com/
• http://doodle.com/online-calendar

Code (Version Control)

(Google Code is being discontinued anway) (version control is not necessarily limited to software development projects, it can also be beneficial to track changes to collaboratively developed documents or data)

• Atlassian Dev Tools https://www.atlassian.com/software/dev-tools (including Git or Mercurial on BitBucket)
• Git on GitHub https://github.com/ (free public hosting) or GitLab https://gitlab.com/ (free public or private hosting; software freely available)
• Subversion SVN https://subversion.apache.org/
• Gogs: http://gogs.io/ (GitLab-like but deploys as a single binary, written in Go)

Collaboration/Project Management

(Which Google service does this address?)

• Cyn.in Community Edition http://cynapse.com/cyn-in/download/
• Liferay Portal Community Edition + Social Office https://www.liferay.com/en/downloads/liferay-portal/available-releases
• Redmine http://www.redmine.org/
• Zimbra https://www.zimbra.com/downloads/zimbra-desktop
• Strikebase http://www.strikebase.com/
• Free version of Planship http://planship.com/
• Free version of MyCollab https://www.mycollab.com/
• Kanboard http://kanboard.net (self-hosted)

Docs (authoring)

Collaborative authoring:

• WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get):
• http://etherpad.org for drafts or other text with minimal markup and structuring
• http://www.fengoffice.com
• http://www.open-xchange.com
• https://owncloud.org with ownCloud Documents

Markup-based:

• https://www.sharelatex.com create PDF from LaTeX (if you need professional layout; alternatively available as free software for self-hosting)
• https://www.authorea.com create PDF from LaTeX or markdown
• https://www.notex.ch create PDF/HTML/EPUB from LaTeX/markdown/reStructuredText (git-versioned but not collaborative?)
• any wiki
• any online markdown editor (see https://github.com/scholmd/scholmd/wiki/Tools-to-support-your-markdown-authoring#web-based-applications for a list)
• https://overleaf.com create PDF from LaTeX (if you need professional layout)

Offline authoring:

• https://libreoffice.org/
• http://www.openoffice.org
• http://www.abiword.org

Chat/Hangout (IM/Video chat)

• https://jitsi.org/ - End-to-end encryption through other services (gchat, facebook, etc.), encrypted IM/video chat using XMPP, in-browser video conferencing

Mail (e-mail)

Webmail (includes hosted IMAP server):

• https://posteo.de/en
• https://mailbox.org
• Fastmail
• http://www.tuffmail.com
• https://www.openmailbox.org/

Self-hosted:

• http://sogo.nu/ for self-hosted webmail incl. calendar + contacts
• https://www.zimbra.com/downloads/zimbra-collaboration-open-source Zimbra
• Dovecot (or other IMAP server) + Roundcube (or other webmailer or client software)

Client software:

• https://www.mozilla.org/thunderbird/ Thunderbird + Enigmail add-on
• https://www.mailpile.is Mailpile

Maps

• http://www.openstreetmap.org

Plus (social networking)

• https://twitter.com Twitter (just because what is public cannot be hacked, leaked or confiscated)
• https://identi.ca/ Identica
• https://diasporafoundation.org/ Diaspora
  http://friendica.com/ join one of these Friendica sites: http://dir.friendica.com/siteinfo
• no, Facebook is not recommended, and here is why: https://bigbrotherawards.de/en/2011/communication-facebook

Reader (RSS)

Feedbin. The cloud version isn't free (I consider this a benefit, but not everyone will). It's open source though, and you can host it yourself.

Self-hosted:

• Tiny Tiny RSS
• selfoss — even more parsimonious than Tiny Tiny RSS
• miniflux
• Feedbin

Cloud-hosted:

• Feedly
• NewsBlur
• FlowReader
• Digg Reader (uh, shows URLs than cannot be clicked)
• Inoreader
• Feedbin

Android-only:

• Digital Secretary with client-only personalization

Scholar (academic search)

• http://base-search.net
• http://core.ac.uk
• http://paperity.org
• http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu
• http://arxiv.org

Search (general)

• https://duckduckgo.com meta and indy search Sources
• https://startpage.com proxy search Source
• http://www.metager.net meta search (Yahoo?) - Non-profit
• http://yacy.net/en/ DIY search
• http://www.qwant.com indy (Source unknown)
• https://www.findx.com (beta) indy (Own index)
• https://oscobo.us meta search (Yahoo)

Storage

Self-hosted (buy a Raspberry Pi or similar!):

• http://www.seafile.com (like Dropbox)
• https://owncloud.org
• https://syncthing.net/

Cloud-hosted:

• https://wuala.com
• https://spideroak.com
• https://tresorit.com
• https://www.mein-seafile.de/en/

Offline:

• Offline Medical Search works on Android only, and it has not access to Internet

Advertising / Affiliate Network

• http://0pii.com/contact - an Advertising platform without surveillance

Closing words

PS: Sorry if this list is a little bit Germany-biased at the moment. Please add more to eliminate this bias!

More suggestions for the privacy and security conscious: https://prism-break.org/

License for the contents of this page: CC-0 (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)

[self]

For RSS, you should add Feedbin. The cloud version isn't free (I consider this a benefit, but not everyone will). It's open source though, and you can host it yourself.

[laura]

Thanks @self! Feedbin is a great suggestion. Generally, I think it’s a good sign if something has a paid-for option, it means that they have a sustainable business model and are less likely to be tempted to sell people’s data…

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To anyone else wanting to add to the list, you can just hit the little icon at the bottom of the post to add it yourself…

[aral]

Thanks @self — just added Feedbin to the list for you. Also started putting the links into Markdown format.

[Christos]

A nice Webmail alternative is openmailbox.org too!

[adam_ierymenko]

This is also a nice GitHub alternative. Unlike GitLab it isn't a giant omnibus package or a massive sprawling install. It's just one binary:

http://gogs.io

[aral]

Hey @Christos, @adam_ierymenko, this post is wiki-style — feel free to edit the post and add it — and thanks for the suggestions

[martin]

An alternative to produce documents out of standard html is Prince. It is free for personal use, although it produces a watermark on the first page. Great software, an alternative, often overlooked, but alas, not free software.

(Update: Don't really know a) if it should be on the list if it's not free software, and b) where to put it. As I used it as an output method for a wiki, it's also capable to be used collaboratively.)

[AustinPrior]

Should we be drawing a distinction on this list between stopgaps and alternatives?
Would it get too messy?

@aral has defined each term in their respective category descriptions (Stopgaps; Alternatives) and I think it's an important distinction to make.

I'll gladly edit the post if others think it's a good idea

[inmysocks]

Since one of the focuses of ind.ie seems to be making tools that are easy to use would adding tutorials for how to use/setup the things listed be appropriate for this? Or would it be better to wait until this gets split into separate topics?
I have some tutorials on setting up a raspberry pi with syncthing and gitlab but I wanted some opinions about if this should include tutorials first. Also I that feels like a lot of self-promotion and I already added tiddlywiki which I am biased about since I contribute to it.

[laura]

@inmysocks it probably would be better to wait til we split them off. But I’d love to read these tutorials, and they could really help other people.

I’ll start on that today. We can keep this wiki post as an index, so it’ll still be valuable if people want to add to it.

Bias and self-promotion are inevitable when we’re working in a community where people care about what they do! I think the best thing to do is declare our biases and let people make up their own minds… I for one Ind.ie…

[aral]

@inmysocks it probably would be better to wait til we split them off. But I’d love to read these tutorials, and they could really help other people.

Same here!

Laura, let’s start thinking about a simple style guide / template for such tutorials that everyone can make use of. Highly recommend using Hemingway to write them. This will give them a consistent voice, make sure that the language and instruction are seamless and increase their effectiveness. We can follow a very decentralised editorial process for these were authors can write (with reference to the style guide) and we can edit and evolve them.

Exciting!

[inmysocks]

This is what I have on my site at the moment, it includes instructions for getting and setting up a pi too. I checked GitLab again and it looks like they have made significant progress since I installed it on my pi, so that tutorial needs to be rewritten. I am moving to Paris next week so it will be a while, but I am planning on reinstalling everything once I get there and I will rewrite the tutorial then. Hopefully with screenshots this time.

A style guide would be lovely. I haven't been using a consistent style for what I make, I should work on that.

[rodrigoibarra]

Can we just add Heartbeat to social network already??

[jarl_arntzen]

I suggest marking alternatives that support mobile specifically too. Right now the list is PC-focused and while this is not a problem I always have my less computer-savvy family and relatives in mind. Mobile phones as main or single computing device is pretty prevalent and PC-only software has taken a less important role now for personal computing. It's different with schoolwork still, though but even that may change.

[tochen]

My suggestion to list of apps.

https://whispersystems.org/ private messaging For iPhone and Android
https://www.ghostmail.com/ webmail