Disclaimer: I know that being a developer is hard, I’m not trying to say that people should start doing these ideas to please my desires. I just thought it was fun to have a list of ideas that could improve the libre software community and these are some of them that I would really love to see. If you have some other Ideas contribute as well, and if you are a developer and you are looking for something to do but don’t know what, you may gain some inspiration from here.

Projects that do not exist:

  • Libre and privacy respecting alternative to DeepL. Details: I know there are already some libre translators, but I will not stop using DeepL until there’s something as good as it.

  • Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Genius. Details: It’s a website where users create community based lyrics for their favourite artists and can create annotations and add metadata.

  • Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Goodreads. Details: It’s a website where you keep a log of what you’ve read, what you want to read and what you are reading, you can also rate books. Here is an alternative.

  • Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Grammarly. Details: It’s a set of applications or add-ons that help you with typos and it will improve your text.

  • Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Letterboxd. Details: t’s a website where you keep a log of what you’ve seen and what you want to see, you can also rate movies and TV shows.

  • Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Pixabay. Details: It’s a website where you can get images to use without copyright restrictions. I know CC has a website for this but their content is really poor.

  • Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Push notifications. Here is an alternative.

  • Libre and privacy respecting alternative to ReCaptcha.

  • Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Shazam. Details: It’s an application that tells you what you are listening if you let it listen to it

  • Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Unsplash. Details: It’s a website where you can upload and use photos of people that are licensed under a license that allows for use under most circumstances for free.

  • Libre and privacy respecting mouse gesture and radial menu to an operative system level. *Similar to Gesturefy and CompassMenu but in a way that it can work in any application. Look this video for more details since this is probably a really deep and hard to explain topic. Here is an alternative for the radial menu.

  • Libre and privacy respecting website where to upload and download 3D models licensed under a CC.

  • Libre and privacy respecting website where to play a lot of different card games. Details: Similar to Lichess. I am satisfied if you only can play poker until it gains some traction.

  • Fully libre and privacy respecting alternative to Xayn. Details: It’s an application that recommends you articles based on the input you give to the algorithm. Some of its code it’s liberated on GitHub, but not all of it.

  • Libre , decentralized and privacy respecting alternative to Imgur. Details: It would be great if this could work along the fediverse, for example people would host images there instead of here on Lemmy or Mastodon, making these platforms much more lightweight.

  • Libre, privacy respecting and not self hostable visual bookmark manager. *Details: There are a few alternatives here and there, maybe, but they are really awful looking and generally you need to self host. I don’t know how to self host and it would probably make my machine slower, I would prefer something that someone’s alreay hosting. This is exactly like what I’m looking for, but they haven’t launched it yet since they don have enough resources, it could die, too, maybe.

Projects that exist but have some issues:

  • A set of common android apps. Details: I know there are a are a lot of basic Android applications to replace the default ones that come with your phone but I feel someone should create a set that align the aesthetics of them to be coherent with each other. I know Tibor Kaputa does this, but in my opinion I would like something that looks a bit more modern and that has more features, since theirs are based around minimalism. For example, the camera application does not have as many options as my default one, etc.

  • Libre, privacy respecting, aesthetic and functional map application. Details: I haven’t been able to find a working application to see maps, I generally end up using DDG’s in browser map because of this. The only one that worked was one calle Maps which was a fork of a really good one (but it was filled with proprietary and other shady stuff ) but it stopped working after some time. I mention the aesthetic parts because I want to be able to recommend this to people who wouldn’t use it otherwise if it looks like something really “primitive”.

  • Revive waifu2x as a serious project. Details: I really love this website, but I really hate the whole idea of the waifu thing, it is misogynous and I feel like unprofessional.

  • Libre, privacy respecting and highly customizable home launcher. Details: I know there are a ton of home launchers for Android, but most of them focus on minimalism or simplicity, I don’t want that, I want a super customizable full of features application that can let me do almost anything. The closest to this was Lawnchair which is dead, luckily Omega launcher exists now and it looks like it’ll be able to achieve this, but it’s not there yet.

  • Revive AquaDroid Details: It is a really beautiful application but it has some bugs, not so many features and development has halted.

  • ghost_laptop
    OP
    3·
    4 years ago

    My idea isn’t like a social platform but rather a hosting website which focuses on those images being displayed somewhere else, but maybe Pixelfed can be used in the same way? I have heard about IPFS but I haven’t really looked into it, I know it has a lot of different features and possibilities which seems interesting and promising.

    • DessalinesA
      11·
      4 years ago

      Image hosting badly needs a decentralized hosted option, ideally one based on torrents or IPFS, because the situation right now is horrible. The exact same image gets shared to twitter, reddit, imgur, FB, and a ton of other platforms, each having to host their own copy while sharing none of the bandwidth to serve them.

      • southerntofu
        3·
        4 years ago

        Entirely agree. It’s a very political problem. Not sure if it’s an actual conspiracy, but around the same time P2P networks were emerging (Napster/Bittorrent), there was a strong push in the industry for asymmetric DSL (previously everyone had equal upload/download), GSM-based internet (fencing off open wifi by making it illegal in many places), and centralized services.

        Ideally:

        • HTML would natively support alternative URLs for a given piece of content, while keeping traditional href/src for backwards compatibility ; we can already do this with <picture> element, but that doesn’t work with <a> tag for example ; also <picture> is intended for different formats not different protocols, so the browser may end up leaking metadata in unexpected ways
        • browsers would support custom proxies/plugins per type of link (eg magnet: or ipfs:// URIs in <img> tag), because direct integration within the browser is a huge maintenance burden
        • p2p networks like IPFS/DAT/Bittorrent would have a PubSub social replication mechanism, where one person/service may subscribe to content from another person/service and pin it automatically (i’m glad IPFS finally got remote pinning, but there’s no subscription system yet)

        In the video world, there’s Peertube which is an interesting tradeoff:

        • Webtorrent distribution of content with the Peertube server acting as tracker
        • automatic social replication from allowlisted federated instances
        • instance operators can choose not to advertise/serve specific pieces of content they don’t like (moderation)

        What remains to be seen is exactly how to deal with abuse while still providing good censorship-resilience. Still, i believe the same Peertube model could be applied to image hosting.

        • DessalinesA
          1·
          4 years ago

          It would be really nice to have a peertube type torrent solution for images, but it’d be nice if it weren’t reliant solely on webtorrents, but on ordinary torrents too.

          • southerntofu
            1·
            4 years ago

            Well the same content could be distributed over ordinary Bittorrent or IPFS. In fact, Peertube already allows to download magnet/.torrent for a video in which the seeding instances are declared as webseeds/trackers (not sure whether replicating instances are actually trackers also). On the client side, libtorrent has integrated webtorrent support last year (though it remains to be polished) so there’s a whole bunch of clients that will soon-ish be able to peer with webtorrent.

            But yes i don’t see a reason why a such server couldn’t seed the content over different protocols, even Freenet why not? ;)

      • ghost_laptop
        OP
        2·
        4 years ago

        Well, actuall I thought of this because of some other comment you made when someone told you that Lemmy should host other files besides images and you told them you didn’t even want to host images. So yeah, I agree with you, it will be a lot better for the environment, also.

    • geopoliticssuck
      1·
      4 years ago

      Then it’s IPFS, which is distributed, not federated. You can upload a file to service that can pin the files for free (like globalupload.io up to a certain file size) or pin the files yourself. Then other users running IPFS on their machines can pin those files. The network runs a bit like BitTorrent.