Blog • Dorothy R. Howard
Alternatives to Corporate Tech Tools
Large IT firms such as Google (Alphabet), Facebook (Meta), and Amazon, engage in unfair labor practices, illegal data collection and sharing and labor exploitation, and so many other ethically fraught activities.
This list represents some alternatives to widespread digital tools offered by these companies, which I personally like and use.
Adopting any new tool will require some adjustment. Some of these tools are fairly straightforward alternatives, that resemble mainstream products you may be familiar with. Others may require a little more patience or elbow-grease.
Experimenting with new tools for some things, some of the time is also a way to normalize alternatives and grow these projects' userbases, which can contribute to their growth.
Some alternatives are made with explicitly activist intentions, while others are made by people who care about open source licenses, and want to make their source code available for others to build on.
Here is the list:
Search engine: DuckDuckGo
Desktop browsers: Brave, Tor, Firefox
Email: Protonmail
Maps: OpenStreetMap (desktop and mobile)
Social networks: Mastodon
File Hosting (Dropbox alternative): Nextcloud
IRC-based group message boards (Slack alternative): Mattermost
Online voice chat (recording option): Rollcall
Screen recording: Screencast-O-Matic
File storage and reference manager (works for groups and sync): Zotero
Collaborative, online, real-time note taking: Etherpads (this is the Riseup hosted instance), or Cryptpad
Notes: Evernote
Organizing/group decision-making: Loomio
Chromebook OS: Gallium OS
Android browsers: OrFox (Tor browser for Android) + OrBot (free proxy for Tor), Brave, Firefox
Non-tech alternatives
Another strategy is to consider whether you need to replace one technology with another, or if non-tech alternatives or reconfigurations might lead to other possibilities or reduce the ecological footprint of a process that may not require high-tech infrastructure, or a problem that does not in fact need to be solved.
Buying stuff: In person, thrift stores, Craigslist
Buying books: In person, directly from the publisher, Alibris
Notes:
It would be great to put together a directory, in the vein of the Free Software Directory, but even more broad and inclusive.
I would like to consider to make a directory. Feel free to reach out if you have things to add or ideas about how we can share alternatives.