I have a list of my fav apps and services here.

To post them:

Favorite apps and services

Goals

• Privacy conscious, end-to-end encrypted (E2EE).
• Decentralized, no reliance on cloud providers like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Spotify, Netflix Youtube, etc.
• Self-hosted and self-reliant.
  • Simple files preferred over running services.
• Make sure no sites / services are US based.

Media

• Download all music / movies locally, using torrents behind a VPN. (Don’t use Tor for torrenting)
  • Use AirVPN, Mullvad, NordVPN, ProtonVPN
  • Use qbittorrent, deluge, or transmission for a torrent client.
  • Use LibreTorrent on android.
• Use MPV or VLC, open source media players to play media.
• Use jellyfin or SFTP for streaming to other devices, but torrenting is preferred.
• Instead of centralized, hosted youtube alternatives with upload limits, use torrents, and find a platform to post and comment on the magnet links.

Documents and Coding

• Install Syncthing, and put all your documents in a synced folder.
• Write all documents and notes in markdown.
  • Use Typora, Mark Text, or vim as markdown editors / notes.
• Use vim with vimrc and coc.nvim for code.
  • Do not use vscode, it’s difficult to impossible to turn off keylogging.. If you must, use VSCodium, which removes the built-in telemetry.
• Spreadsheets in Libreoffice.

Tasks / Todos

• Use a todo.txt file for a personal task list, synced with syncthing.
  • QTodoTxt as a desktop client, Simpletask Cloudless for Android.
• For shared task lists, use Etherpad.
• No good solution yet for calendars, really wish there were good file-based calendar apps. Radicale is a server based solution.

Collaboration

• Use Etherpad, or CodiMD

Browsing

• Use Firefox or Tor Browser, with the addons:
  • uBlock Origin
  • Privacy Badger
  • Facebook Container - Keeps all Facebook stuff in it’s own container.
  • Google Container
• Startpage, Searx (onion service), as a search engine
• If using Tor, use onion services if possible.

Passwords

• Use KeePassXC.
  • Install the Firefox KeePassXC plugin.
  • Use a long master pass phrase, with at least 10 words.
  • Sync your password file everywhere you need using Syncthing.
• Bitwarden if you want to host a server.

Chat

• Use Matrix / Riot, turn on e2ee in rooms.
• Use Thunderbird for email, e2ee with pgp if possible.

Social Media

• Twitter alternative : Mastodon
• Facebook : Friendica
• Reddit : Lemmy (made by me), PostMill, or Lobste.rs
• Medium : Plume, WriteFreely
• YouTube : Torrents, or peertube.
• Instagram : Pixelfed .

Operating system

• Use Linux. I like Arch Linux or its user friendlier variants, manjaro and antergos.

Here’s a quick neat thing. You can use the Redirector Firefox plugin with the following settings to automatically redirect all youtube links to Invidious:

Youtube to Invidious Redirect: https://www.youtube.com/(.*) to: https://invidio.us/$1 Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvZlnus_OIE → https://invidio.us/watch?v=IvZlnus_OIE

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/scroll_anywhere/ - avoid stiff and hard to hold center mouse buttons, use right click to scroll instead.

https://github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr/ - beautiful markdown writer and note taker.

https://tixati.com/ - ugly lightweight advanced torrent client

https://potplayer.daum.net - beautiful VLC alternative

https://acestreamsearch.net/en/?q=sky - many ace streams are held behind walled gardens but they are publicly searchable, if you know what the title will be for your live streaming event (sometimes the title is obfuscated by the streamer).

https://www.sodaplayer.com/ - simply plays live ace streams.

https://torrent-gql.analogic.al/?variables={ "query"%3A "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" }&query=query(%24query%3A String!) { torrents(query%3A %24query%2C providers%3A [EXTRATORRENT%2C PIRATEBAY%2C TORRENTZ2]) { title seeds desc peers size magnet } }

Raw graphql api for searching popular torrent sites, it’s without a gui so it will likely never be blocked.

Also, GNU Savannah exists for a github/gitlab alternative.

Android/replicant software:

G-droid in place of Google play store: https://f-droid.org/packages/org.gdroid.gdroid/

Although it only supports the f-droid app repository I like the UI more compared to the official f-droid app and feel the ability to leave short reviews make it a more suitable replacement for the play store

Fennec f-droid in place of chrome. It’s a deblobbed Firefox that is closer to the current upstream and has add on support.

Suggestions for adds ons: https everywhere, which ensures that a secure connection is used on sites where one is known to exist. Link: https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere/

Ublock origin, in addition to blocking known trackers, malware sites and ads you can have JavaScript only enabled on a per site basis or block large media by default ect.(you can adjust what size is considered large if you wish). Link: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

At the moment this is what I can recommend that I haven’t seen already here.

pc/server:

• Geany as my graphical IDE (Mainly for the debugger interface. I’, still learning to use plugins with vim and gdb from cli is a bit overwelming, to say the least)
• hledger or ledger as a cli personal finance manager. It features double-bookkeeping and rocks a very well documented text format. The data is directly accessible with any editor you want. If the cli is not for you, you can use the tui mode thanks to ncurses or a simple webpage opened locally on your computer, thanks to hledger-web. I discovered it after I started to care more about accessibility of data. The migration from my previous manager (silverstrike) was smooth thanks to awk.
• Nextcloud as a personal web storage. It allows federation with other nextcloud instances if needed and it can also be expanded with a lot of plugins for other necessities, making it a groupware platform.
  Altough I only need to sync data, I can’t move to syncthing because I haven’t found a way to sync only on demand, while still viewing that something has changed on the remote counterpart.
• FunkWhale is a music listening platform that is just starting to come out of it’s nest. I started using it a week ago to discover non-mainstream music. At the moment there are only a handful of pods, but sometimes I come across something I like. I really suggest to give it a shot.
• Gitea for hosting git repos at home. Great open source project which powers its own hosting site and another one with a custom blue/white theme (although I can’t remember the name, my bad).
• Hugo is a powerful static site generator. I use it to process my plaintext markdown files to add an aestetic touch to my personal wiki.
  Before adopting it, I used dokuwiki. They are both great tools, although they serve different purposes and hugo does just fine for me. I did not need the embedded editor, or the upload button, nor the multi-person login. And on top of that, I just use a static webserver, no more php. Less is more, right?
• Miniflux as an hosted feed aggregator. I tried to go host-less but syncronisation was a bit of a pain for me. When I returned on the hosted path, I switched to this program. It’s fast, minimal and has a low footprint. It could run on a pi1 probably without complaining a bit. Maybe the only downside is that it forces users to adopt postgres.
• Finally, I shut down my shaarli instance in favour of a simple script I wrote to manage my bookmarks. The rationale is still the “go human readable files, go host-less” approach I am preferring lately, but I still recommend that software.

phone (android specifically). These recommendations should be google-less, as I have a google-free rom and no app complains:

• orgzly is an org-mode notes and todo writer. Notes can be synced in another local folder or with a webdav server. On pc you can open them with emacs (natively), with vim using a plugin for syntax highlighting or with another editor. Well, you could even use sed. Anyone has its favorite tools.
• davx does a great job at syncing calendars, tasks and contacts with a caldav server like Radicale.
• decsync cc is an alternative to davx that works by leveraging a local directory and by saving everything in ics files. It handles concurreny by using different folders as sync points and by using a different id for each device in that folder. The folder can then be synced with syncthing, nextcloud etcetera.
• etesync is another contact and calendar sync solution that works with its server counterpart and promotes e2ee. It also provides a cheap (2 dollars/month) hosted account if someone can’t host at home.
• untrack me is a small app which can be used to open youtube, twitter, instagram content in a proxy service. The user shares the link to the app and the app transforms it in a proxied-service link. The proxy instance can be configured. You could point it to a personal instance, or use the public ones.
• all the apps provided by tibor caputa (simplemobiletools). If someone has problems removing the google dialer (not just the call starter, but the entire in-call ui package), he just released an app that works just fine as a replacement.
• slide is another reddit client. It is multi-account friendly and has a lot of customisation settings.