We should be wary of feature creep. Lemmy is a link aggregator, that’s it. I don’t see why lemmy should also have a chat feature. If you want to have a discussion outside of lemmy in a traditional chatroom, then just use Matrix/Discord/XMPP/etc.
Some associations and cooperatives offer email accounts as a free trial. If you live in France, you can get almost all your Internet services provided by associations/cooperatives: https://chatons.org/. This has the benefit of you being a “member” and not “customer”/“client” of the organisation, but this means you have to pay a yearly subscription
My university is going to set up a Mattermost service because every major and student club is using Discord, even some classes are using it, which is a shame. What also really bothers me is that since the crisis began a year ago, we’re still using Blackboard Collaborate which is proprietary, I don’t see why we don’t use BigBlueButton
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.
GNU IceCat is, once again, the only viable libre web browser.
IPFS for all of them. You can use globalupload.io if you can’t pin them yourself.
I already know outline.com, it is also proprietary, I’m looking for a replacement for that as well
There’s always yacy.net, decentralised and free software. The search results are pretty bad though but it at least exists.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, every major power is going to copy China and there’s not much one can do about it, their policies really have been far-sighted. But you shouldn’t see data collection as a political tool, you see, the EU is behind in AI and since practically of the EU’s personal data is stored in the US (because they all use GAFA), they can’t train their models properly. China created the firewall, blocked GAFA (and of course political threats), and developed their own domestic Internet industry; now China is ahead in AI facial and speech recognition. There’s a EU Commission paper that proposes a European firewall that functions like the Chinese version because they know they will fall behind. In the US they already have the “Clean Network” and they’re going to block TikTok and WeChat.
Rotten Tomatoes is a commercial product and is owned by the major US media conglomerates. We’re looking for an open source alternative.