An introduction to the Small Web, alternatives to Google products and less-predatory social medias.
The current internet sucks. “Social" media is no more than an advertising platform, Google is collecting literal gigabytes of information on you, Facebook has a profile on you whether you like it or not. Luckily there are a lot of very smart people who also think it sucks, and want to change it. By depriving big companies of their products - because don’t kid yourself, you are the product - we can help make the internet a fun place to be again!
Alternatives to Google
nomoregoogle.com - a large list of alternatives to Google services (not all are perfect but better than Google at least)
proton.me/mail - free email with end-to-end encryption (the company cannot access your email content even if subpoena'd)
libreoffice.org - free, open-source OpenOffice or Google Docs alternative
www.mozilla.org - browser that doesn't track you + blocks other trackers
curlie.org - massive collection of useful links ordered by category maintained by volunteers
duckduckgo.com - search engine that doesn't track you
Alternative social medias
www.imood.com and status.cafe - twitter alternatives (post + receive "status updates")
spacehey.com - new myspace
multiverse.plus - creative blogging/scrapbooking tool, super fun!!!! kind of similar to tumblr
matrix.org - similar to discord but decentralised + end2end encrypted
Many of these "social medias" require you to use an RSS/Atom reader to subscribe to other feeds. My personal recommendation is protopage:
www.protopage.com
Creating your own space on the internet
neocities.org - free website hosting w/ no ads or watermarks
zonelets.net - simple tool to make a blog on a html site
www.khanacademy.org - coding tutorial, took me less than 2 hours very useful
www.w3schools.com - another tutorial/reference (more in depth but less tutorial-y)
This doesn’t fit into any of the other categories, but:
news.ycombinator.com - collection of interesting computerish articles and very civil + nice forum (don't be put off by the name)
Interesting/cool personal websites
sadgrl.online - why does this matter?
isaacfish.neocities.org - further reading + the author’s personal link collection and website
wmbu.net cinni.net redstring.neocities.org 44nifty.com - some of my favourite sites
Feel free to contact me if you're interested in learning more / need any help!