A handful of companies monopolise the web, with unprecedented access to our data. But there are many more ethical – and often distinctively European – alternatives
Amazon is a hard one to find an alternative to. Mostly what I try to do now is buy directly from the brand. But they don’t always have their own website.
Other times I can find the item locally. I’ll buy it even if it costs a little more.
Also, sometimes the item is only available at Amazon or Home Depot online, for example. In that case, I’ll pick Home Depot cuz they’re a slightly smaller megacorp.
As a very last resort, I’ll will begrudgingly buy from Amazon. Like if the item is only on Amazon or if the item is significantly cheaper there…
But, fuck Amazon Prime! That’s a total scam. I canceled that years ago and never looked back.
My gripe on a browser is I want one that whe. I click a link it’s opened in a container by default so it can’t scoop up all my cookies and browsing history.
Right now my flow is Firefox focus as default browser, then if it’s a page I want to view later or keep open I share it to Firefox. Kind of annoying but ideally I have this in just one browser.
And as I write this and checked, Firefox for Android now does this lol. Vivaldi, the one recommended in the article does not. Not to mention I try and support something that is not chrome-based. We need alternatives
LibreWolf doesn’t open tabs in containers, but it is kind of hard coded to never save cookies, passwords, trackers. Every time you close and open browser, it is like to open a freshly installed browser on a freshly installed OS.
Now all it needs to do is randomize your fingerprint.
because your fingerprint can be just as, if not more identifiable and trackable, than your cookies and such.
Random fingerprint is trackable. If fingerprint is the same as other users then they can’t track you
Don’t forget to ditch Google and Apple pay as well.
What is the opinion on Vivaldi here as an alternative? I am using Firefox and Zen currently. But I wouldn’t mind jumping towards a European alternative. I switched to Firefox to support an alternative to chromium based browsers, but I think EU/Nordic angle is more important to me.
Vivaldi is basically Chrome but better, design is better, privacy 1000% better and there’s a couple of extra cool features. But very similar to Chrome, for Chrome users it’s the easiest swap, a true upgrade.
Personally I would days away from any chromium-based browser, if only on principle.
Zen is great and keeps getting better, if anyone tried it some time ago and had stability problems, chances are your experience would be much better now.
I’m using Vivaldi and I really like it. The way I can group tabs into workspaces is really nicefor example.
First thing I saw was “Subscribe via Google”
Why doesn’t it mention the Fediverse at all???
Seems like they’re advocating using a Fairphone running e/OS, Ecosia as the search engine, LibreWolf as the browser, LibreOffice as the office package, and W for social media?
The steady exodus from Elon Musk’s X has benefited smaller, independent alternatives such as … German-developed Mastodon
This is probably a much more efficient “mention of the fediverse” than if the journalist had started trying to explain that there is this federated network of independent social media sites bla bla bla.
The people reading this are looking for something they can understand. I expect naming Mastodon and leaving it to them to check it out will convert more people than if they started trying to explain what it is.
I’m a bit weirded out by all the attention given to w-social.eu by mainstream media, though. First of all it doesn’t exist yet, second we have no reason to believe it will actually be decent, third we have good reason to believe it won’t be.
Someone once said “don’t let perfection be the enemy of good” … or something like that.
Anyway, my point is it’s good that this kind of stuff is starting to get into mainstream media, even if they don’t go into as much detail as they could.
They might not have wanted to scare people off by giving them too much information all at once, especially things like the Fediverse which even lots of tech savvy people don’t really understand.
Yeah, that was my main criticism of the article, it completely omitted social media.
Also, the author mentions Codeberg as the “developer” of Librewolf, so it seems is not the most tech savvy around.
Huh, I wouldn’t say, the article mentioned Codeberg as the developer of Librewolf.
It says:
An even more private (but still free and equally effective) version of Firefox is LibreWolf, which was developed on Codeberg, a German nonprofit.
To be honest this sentence doesn’t make any sense at all: Librewolf wasn’t developed, it is in active development. But it is true that it’s being developed on Codeberg, which still doesn’t convey a lot of information to the reader… I dont know if this article is very helpful at all…
It previously said “by” Codeberg, so the author either catched the error or read someone else pointing out the mistake.
It reads like AI slop in my opinion.
Cody Berg was hired by Linus Tovalds after Gita Hub left his company.
There’s a whole section on social media. That’s where they discuss Mastodon and W, among others
I meant it barely touched the surface there when there’s plenty of alternatives, not mentioning it just mixes xitter with facebook, instead of mentioning alternatives for each “category” (ie: instagram / pixelfed, x / mastodon, facebook / friendica, etc.). If you read the articles it seems that there’s almost no choice here.
And social media is arguably the main thing. The network effects make it sticky but the US has been amazing at exporting it’s culture, social media amplifies that, and right now that culture is a bit fascisty with a hint of freedom stopping regulation of the rich and misleading. That said, but that lens, I’m not really sure Lemmy is a great alternative since it has a lot of people from the US already and I think it wouldn’t scale well (either because of lack of instances, burn out from moderators, or the problems migrating here)
curiously, he didn’t mention linux as well
Step one to moving to Linux should be switching to open source alternatives to the proprietary software you use while you are still on windows. If all the programs you use are already open source, then switching to Linux is so much easier.
Maybe the author doesn’t know the fediverse yet. We could try commenting there or maybe contacting him
Cookie-walled article.
Script extension blocks them all on firefox.
they left out framasoft (the greatest suite that most degooglers have never heard of)
Oooh! They made Peertube?!
I indeed had never heard of it, but now I have! I looks like a great suit of tools!
What’s your experience using it?
Framasoft is not so much about providing the service itself, they have limited resources, but to show alternatives exist and are usable. They develop some of the tools (we own them Peertube!).
So they host services, and sometimes end them (with ample warning and instructions to migrate). As they explain: their goal is not to become an “open Google”. It’s to to make de-googling possible and usable by the many.
As service providers, you should look into the CHATONS.
These are mostly based on the Framasoft suite.
i knew it wasn’t gonna mention the fediverse
Mastadon was mentioned.
