What apps would you love to have open-source alternatives for?
2y 2mon ago by lemmy.world/u/ClearCutCoconut in opensource@lemmy.ml
It seems like the FOSS community is continuing to grow, and FOSS apps keep getting better (Immich reallh blew my mind recently), which is a big win 😎 but there are still many apps I use that I would kill for an open source alternative. I am curious what you guys think? Are there any apps you'd love alternatives for?
Discord. It's extremely popular and has no direct alternatives (Matrix spaces thing isn't ready at all yet)
EDIT: I didn't know Revolt and Zulip existed. I'm doing a research on them now
Matrix is also extremely complicated to sign up for. I tried getting some tech savvy friends to sign up for Matrix the other day. Even for someone tech-savvy it is waaaaaaaay too complicated. Many of the clients don't even have a sign up option, you need to sign up elsewhere first.
Yeah...for many of these programs the onboarding is so daunting, even for those who are tech savvy. Laymen don't stand a chance with something that is that complicated. It doesn't often seem to be a technical issue either, more-so a user experience or design problem
It doesn’t often seem to be a technical issue either, more-so a user experience or design problem
Oh 100%. The problem is that there's a lack of UX designers and such in the Open Source community. There's technical people building stuff but they often don't know how to make a good user experience (or in some cases they don't care to).
IDK why this always gets downvoted. UI/UX some of the biggest issues with FOSS software, and is a massive barrier to entry to someone who isn't a massive computer nerd willing to put up with that shit.
I guess they take any criticism of open source as if you are against the whole movement. I don't understand either.
honestly i don't even think it's a FOSS problem, this is a problem with every UI ever made in the last three years essentially.
Unless it's literally making money off of you having an account, there is no incentive to design a good UI from the ground up. The solution here ironically, is simply don't skill issue, or document it very well.
personally when it comes to the onboarding im more on the side of "self host your own onboarding, for friends and family and shit, and then federate out from there if needed."
Theoretically doing a clean onboarding shouldn't be very difficult. More involved i suppose, but if you don't have the time to figure out how a federated instance works, (or to properly document it) you shouldn't be on the internet, you have more pressing matters to attend to.
There are instances that are not very hard to sign up for. The main issue with Matrix is instability and performance, especially when communicating with users/groups on different instances. It's really not a great experience. And the inability to properly delete messages can be a big deal too
Many of the clients don’t even have a sign up option, you need to sign up elsewhere first.
It's inconvenient, sure, but think of it as an assurance that you're not locked in with one app.
That said, I completely agree that Matrix and Element need to work on UX, particularly making it easy for new users to adopt it as well as verification/device switching.
@SorteKanin I'd like to see that. I have already onboarded about 35 students and my whole family to matrix, nobody had any problems with signup. Bigger problem is later if they get the infamous "Unable to decrypt message" error.
Yeah. I still don't understand all the encryption stuff. I lost all my encrypted texts even after I used my recovery pass phrase on a new session.
Can't relate. It's not harder to get your hands on a matrix account in comparison to a mail account. And for those that want it even easier, just download Element and you are guided through the default registration at matrix.org
I keep hearing people recommend signal messenger as an alternative to discord, and honestly that's the most obvious sign you don't actually use discord
Yeah signal is amazing for one to one or small groups, but not for what discord servers are used for.
But to be honest, many discord servers are used for things they really shouldn't be used for... Like code documentation and bug tracking
Well some people use Discord as a messenger for some reason and for them Signal is probably the best but yea it's not a Discord alternative at all
Revolt is very promising, not ready yet but already feels very similar to Discord
The privacy policy of their app's captcha solution is horrendous so no thank you
Doesn't seem that bad, when you go to log in it checks your IP, length of time on the site and mouse movements.
hCaptcha
This section has been adapted from hCaptcha's documentation.
We use the hCaptcha anti-bot service (hereinafter "hCaptcha") on our website. This service is provided by Intuition Machines, Inc., a Delaware US Corporation ("IMI"). hCaptcha is used to check whether the data entered on our website (such as on a login page or contact form) has been entered by a human or by an automated program. To do this, hCaptcha analyzes the behavior of the website or mobile app visitor based on various characteristics. This analysis starts automatically as soon as the website or mobile app visitor enters a part of the website or app with hCaptcha enabled.
When using the Revolt App, hCaptcha will only begin analysis when you:
Submit a login request.
Submit a registration request.
Submit a password reset / email resend request.
For the analysis, hCaptcha evaluates various information (e.g. IP address, how long the visitor has been on the website or app, or mouse movements made by the user). The data collected during the analysis will be forwarded to IMI.
Data processing is based on Art. 6(1)(f) of the GDPR (DSGVO): the website or mobile app operator has a legitimate interest in protecting its site from abusive automated crawling and spam. IMI acts as a "data processor" acting on behalf of its customers as defined under the GDPR, and a "service provider" for the purposes of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). For more information about hCaptcha and IMI's privacy policy and terms of use, please visit the following links: https://hcaptcha.com/privacy/and https://hcaptcha.com/terms.
The Revolt's policy is not that bad. Look at the hCaptcha's one
That's the part of hCaptchas policy that's relevant to Revolt.
For the analysis, hCaptcha evaluates various information (e.g. IP address, how long the visitor has been on the website or app, or mouse movements made by the user). The data collected during the analysis will be forwarded to IMI.
Did you miss these parts or are they inapplicable?
How We Use Information We use the information we collect for the following purposes: To administer Integrator and Customer accounts and provide the Service. We use Personal Information in order to associate specific accounts with Integrators and Customers and to provide them the Service, to respond to requests or inquiries, to provide support or technical assistance, and to facilitate payments. To improve to Site and the Service. We use Analytics Information to improve our existing and develop new services and offerings and to customize existing and future product offerings. To derive market insights. We use Analytics Information to analyze the market and conduct business analyses related to the Site and our Services, and for other research purposes. To provide a market for Labeled Data. Our Service enables high volume data labeling and human review for machine learning systems as a service to website owners and companies who need help getting their data labeled. To that end, we disclose Labeled Data to our Customers interested in acquiring Labeled Data. To secure our services and systems. We use Analytics Information to secure our systems by identifying potential threats and vulnerabilities, and to otherwise protect the information we collect. For any legitimate business purpose, provided that the information is de-identified or aggregated such that it cannot be reasonably tied to an individual.
How We Share Information We share or disclose personal information in the following cases: Upon direct request from an Integrator to identify the fraud risk of a specific CAPTCHA challenge request or IP address, or otherwise where specific consent was given. With vendors we engage to provide essential aspects of the Sites and the Service, such as data storage, hosting, and Analytics, and only for those purposes. As necessary to comply with applicable law, including governmental requests, law enforcement requests, and otherwise to public and private entities in order to protect the rights, privacy, safety, or property of you, us, or others. With others for any legitimate business purpose, provided the information is de-identifiedor aggregated such that it cannot be reasonably tied to an individual.
Disclosure Regarding "Sales" of Personal Information under the CCPA. In the preceding twelve months, IMI has not "sold" any Personal Information (as defined by the CCPA), nor does IMI have actual knowledge of any "sale" of Personal Information of minors under 16 years of age (so they do sell information of people over 16). Disclosure Regarding "Sharing" for "Cross-Context Behavioral Advertising" under the CCPA. In the preceding twelve months, IMI has not "shared" any Personal Information for "cross-context behavioral advertising" (as such terms are defined in the CCPA), nor does IMI have actual knowledge of any "sharing" of Personal Information of minors under 16 years of age for "cross-context behavioral advertising".
I based my assumptions on the parts in Revolts privacy policy, since reading the privacy policy of hCatpcha it alludes that each 'vendor' can select how much data they'd like to collect I assumed that Revolt only allowed them to collect IP, length of time on site and mouse movements. While they do sell information, they claim it to be anonymised and I contacted support to see how they did that for IP addresses.
Which is why I don't really mind. The information they have of me is at most how my cursor moved, how long I took to Submit a login request, Submit a registration request, Submit a password reset / email resend request and an obfuscated IP. Seems OK to me.
Tbh I forgot about the part about vendors limiting the data. I was focused on other ones. And I think Revolt itself is pretty trustworthy so they should limit it (hopefully). I guess I'll try it. I really want to be a part of good open-source projects
I really want to be a part of good open-source projects
I get it, though I try to remind myself that perfection is the enemy of good. Especially in comparison to Discord which makes its money through [???] and is somehow only getting worse.
Discord is a commercial proprietary product with questionable owners. Of course it's getting worse all the time
Honestly i never enjoyed discord It is messy and difficult to find information once its a few days old
Id much rather use a decent forum really
This is more of a hammer as a screwdriver problem, where everyone decided to use chat software as a forum.
almost every hobby has moved to facebook and it's the same damn thing. utterly useless for the purpose people try to use it for.
i don't know what the fuck is wrong with people, but this is definitely one of the pinnacles.
They want to use a single account for everything and have the most people possible.
That is it really. They don't want to have to make 50 new accounts where every account has to deal with getting past the spam policies and filters only to find that their potential base is 1/10 of that on other platforms
That's why reddit became the de-facto forum for many things also. 1 interface, 1 account, people can trace your account across different "forums" and it was searchable (on search engines, not shit reddit search).
There are currently a wave of people moving certain activities to Band of all fucking things (using it side by side with facebook due to facebook policies). It's basically a shitty korean clone of facebook but slower and with less stability and even less features.
They could have picked ANY of the platforms actually designed for the intended purpose. But Band? It's the OPPOSITE of useful.
People don't make sense.
Especially with the upcoming implementation of ads. Really sucks that many communities and software support (who should have just had forums) are deeply embedded into it and will have to start from scratch and lose any and all helpful content. Its hard to see big communities moving to anything else anytime soon, even of there was a great Foss alternative. It would indeed be amazing to have one in the first place
I think what’s even worse than ads is many channels now require verification through a phone number if you want to write something. Not sure when that became a thing but I just recently ran into this roadblock and noped tf out.
I thought the Discord ads drama was an April Fools joke?
You had me for a second, lol. Unfortunately it is not an April fools joke :/ luckily for us though, the worse the application gets, the higher a chance a Foss alternative will emerge from a madlad who was sick of discord's shit
https://adguard.com/en/blog/ads-discord-blocking-adguard.html
Adoption is always the main issue, as we can see here on the Fediverse. It's crazy how even technically-inclined people flock to discord. So many 3d printing communities are on there, people who install custom debian distros on raspberry pis, solder wires, crimp connectors and assemble open source machines, still fall into the trap.
Hmm I really hope so
https://zulip.com/is likely your best alternative. It's more a Slack copy than Discord but the features are there
I recently ran into that very issue, leading to me downloading (one foss) third party clients for discord which are privacy focused. As long as discord is still the place to be I have to be there too, but I can certainly limit the data they can gather about me. I found
- goofcord for desktop (supports plugins too)
- aliucord for android
Perhaps they are an option for you too
Didn't know those existed.
Aliucord looks like a modified client tho, so not really open source.
Fair enough
I couldn't get goofcord to work on Wayland but webcord works great
If you're talking about voice channels specifically, then there is Mumble.
If you're talking about chat rooms, old school solution is IRC and we have XMPP that works fine for most people.
Mumble needs a server, iirc
Edit to be more precise, it needs you to host a server of your own
I let you in on a secret: Discord also needs a server 🙃
... Ok I'll let you have that 'technical correct' smug satisfaction, you bastard.
But for real, if you can't / don't want to host your own server, just use any server from hundreds of available servers.
Oh I's been a while. My clan hosted our own mumble server, back in the day. Didn't know there was a lot of public ones nowadays...
There are even services that give you free temporary servers. I don't know why anyone would use that instead of just finding any server and use a free room if you just want to talk with friends, but well, it exists.
You go to a service like that, press a button, it generates you some random port number and password, then you connect to that server with mumble and become an admin of it. The server is temporary and gets automatically destroyed after some fixed period (usually something like 24 hours).
Also what I tried to do with my friends is run Yggdrasil and connect directly via IPv6 (so I run Yggdrasil and launch a mumble server, and all my friends enter my IPv6 address) and that works too, so no need to have public IPs or domain names to use Mumble anymore.
Yggdrasil is such a cool thing, loving it.
yeah, host one. It's not expensive. Certainly cheaper than paying for discord nitro (which you don't have to do if you want shitty audio/video streaming quality and no emojus features)
No I meant an app that looks similar and contains most of the features (servers specifically) so it's easier for not tech savvy users to get into. Someone suggested Revolt but its privacy (as in sending the data to not privacy respecting third parties) is questionable so idk if I can consider it a good enough alternative
Something like Revolt could maybe be a replacement for discord
Lol
There is a project, but it's really early in it's development. It's called Cabal. Has a nice desktop client, looks kinda like Discord. It's p2p, so no server required. BUT AGAIN, VERY EARLY IN DEVELOPMENT.
Not something you should use, but look out for how the development is going.
There seem to be quite a few projects. It's slowing the development down. It would be better if everyone focused on one. But peer to peer is interesting. I'm wondering how much disk space it will use a day if I'm in a group with like 100k people though
Plain banking apps for smartphones. Having those developed in the open would hopefully make it possible to have forks that work on rooted devices without hiding magisk and whatnot.
That would be awesome. I wish banks would also have standardized (or at least open) APIs so I could use FOSS financial software to pull my live purchase history and then categorize that and etc. I think some banks do this, but not very common in the US from what I can tell.
Yeah, if banks had open and standardised APIs we could all use the same FLOSS banking app — or choose from any of a bazillion FLOSS apps. Instead they're going the authoritarian route and locking customers in with bloated black box, proprietary apps...
In Europe we have PSD2 but I dunno if it's enough to create a full app
i learned about GNU Taler the other day from one of the OS communities
Sure, I guess. Not what I was after but it has potential in its own right.
I had to leave VirginMoney because the lady on the phone told me I needed an iPhone to reset my password (seriously) even after trying with three separate Android devices.
There's no desktop functionality (mobile is king with them) and it amazed me that day I had to use the Current Account Switcher to go to an equally meh banking service.
Sorry state of affairs across all mobile apps to be honest and as seen by the prevalence of MDM and accessing data Vs doing the very same, on a desktop "PC". Why the data is more precious on a mobile device to them is telling.....
My phone firmware
FOSS CAD softwares. I know FreeCAD exists but it’s very unintuitive compared to the proprietary ones. I am thankful that it exists but it’s a long way apart to become a household name like Blender.
I wish I could start writing one but I don’t have a clear picture of requirements to plan and start writing one. If anyone is expert in this field please link some research papers and guidelines for someone to start fresh.
I wish there were more Open Source games.
Spotify.
An open source music streaming service where I can financially support artists but where I'm not forced to put up with annoying advertisements (even when paying membership fees!), and which allows me to use whatever app I want to play the music I listen to. It is annoying AF that I need to switch between apps to listen to music because Spotify's shitty native app is inferior in every possible way with the single exception of offering more content.
There seems like a lot of potential for an app like this with the mixture of decentralization/encryption/verification/blockchain/etc. Easily verify artists, get the artists paid with a determined currency or by merch and donations, have it federated or decentralized so artists have more control and a company can’t take percentages.. I don’t know. There has to be something there. It seems possible and almost a necessity in the future for artists to make money and corporations to not enshittify each app that is released. For example, spotify adding features to try to be like TikTok, or recently they were trying to add “educational courses” to the app
my personal favorite is the one where the band or artist hosts their own site, and then you can just buy shit from it.
I use spicetify just to get an improved shuffle function.
How does that fix the shuffling? I thought it was just a UI tweak.
I hate Spotify's shuffling so I'm all ears
For desktop there's ncspot, which is a Spotify TUI client written in Rust. Not exactly what you were asking for, but it does work well
Reminds me how librivox and others publish their audiobooks as podcasts. I guess artists could upload their albums like this?
I use Ymusic it is android, but shouldn't be hard to run on Linux
there's this really cool alternative to streaming, called you buy their shit directly. Or if you like me, don't really care, just finding a way to throw money at them, in their general direction sometimes works. Spotify actually works so little, that the only party that makes money, is the music publishers that spotify allows on their platform, the artists and spotify generally don't make much money, or make very little money. Gotta love capitalism.
If you're a music artist, please allow people to just give you money directly, in some way. It'll incentivize people who don't pay for it to send you a few dollary doos.
there’s this really cool alternative to streaming, called you buy their shit directly.
Wow, mind blown! I had no idea money could be used to buy things directly! /s
Seriously though, buying music from artists you already know is easy for artists that actually provide this as an option, but it doesn't help when trying to find new artists and songs to listen to. Spotify is brilliant for discovering new content and can't be replaced by 'buying shit directly'.
i suppose that's fair, but it's not like spotify is the only service that has music on it. Personally i've been enjoying nabbing music that other people use in media that i consume, or just bumping across something that seems interesting on the net somewhere.
I've gone from liking like two albums from a certain band, to liking their entire discography, just because i've downloaded it. You can absolutely still find music, it just requires some effort, and it's well placed effort i think.
Ultimate Guitar Tabs. After spending years getting a community to contribute to one of the best music resources on the web, they turn around and lock all but the most basic features behind a pay wall.
Photoshop.
And yeah, no, please, don't come over and mention Gimp and Kryta and all the others. I get it, they're cool for the stuff they do. They just aren't the all in one package that Photoshop is or have as powerful tools specifically for photo editing. Photoshop would require a Blender-style major effort to replicate and Gimp just isn't up to it. I wish it were. Photoshop is at the perfect intersection of being uniquely capable and walled off behind the single crappiest ecosystem in software.
Nobody likes Adobe, nobody wants to work with Adobe. Nobody can avoid Photoshop. That's just the world we live in and I don't like it.
Well, counterpoint: Photoshop tries to be an "everything for everybody" app, and GIMP/Krita don't need to compare to that, as little as any user needs all the features of Photoshop.
Nobody can avoid Photoshop
Call me nobody, then. I worked with the Adobe suite professionally for 15+ years, haven't touched it for the past six. You won't find a single 1:1 replacement. It's just a matter of quitting and accepting the individual limits of different alternatives.
It's a groupthink issue anyways. 3DSmax/Maya was the same for a long time, and "everyone" was saying Blender is not an alternative. And then some big companies switched to Blender and suddenly people stopped complaining about it. And while Blender did improve during that time, it did not improve so substantially that it really made all the difference.
It's absolutely that, like the office admin workers who swear by Microsoft Office over open alternatives no matter how insidious Windows becomes. "I know this one tool and you will have to wring it from my cold dead hands"...
"I find your conditions... acceptable"
this pretty much. Everytime i see people bitching about editors and editing, it's almost always keybinds. Which is literally a skill issue. Or something will be organized slightly differently, also a skill issue. Or it's feature set will be like, marginally different.
It's almost never something that's going to stop you from doing what you wanted originally. Your visions change, your tools change, your ways adapt, it's how the world works, it's how we work. It's how everything has always been.
I agree that it depends on your use case. If you're an artist or illustrator you can make do with a number of alternatives and just go elsewhere for photo editing, and if you're just doing basic adjustments to photos rather than detailed edits you can figure it out as well.
Photohop is harder to bypass if you're a jack-of-all-trades user mostly doing image editing but also dabbling in the other options from time to time. That's not to say you can't do it if you try, but it's going to be less convenient and add friction to your workflow.
Yeah, Jack-of-all-trades here as well. For sure it's less convenient to have to switch programs for different purposes but there is also the added convenience of not having to find pirated and cracked Adobe warez.
Based. Just curious, what do you use for vector editing software? (For Illustrator-type work)
Not much, honestly. Fortunately I was never very reliant on vector graphics.
Inkscape IMO never really matured to a working solution, certainly not comparable to Illustrator, but I know others have better experiences.
Nobody likes Adobe, nobody wants to work with Adobe. Nobody can avoid Photoshop. That’s just the world we live in and I don’t like it.
This sounds like Stockholm syndrome. You are just too familiar with Photoshop, so using anything else is hard and less efficient.
In photography there is this mantra about "the most important part is right behind the camera". A good photographer is not a good Nikon user, or good Canon user. A good photographer can deliver decent pictures with a potato camera if needed.
Sure, a potato camera is less efficient for any work that an actual good one. So it's good to invest in a good brand. But the point is: if you are not capable to make average results with a potato software, the problem is not in the software.
You know why the person themselves is the important part of this equation?
Because they know what tools to use for which purpose.
For example, GIMP is only now getting non-destructive editing through adjustment layers, which is such an indispensable feature for important projects
For example, GIMP is only now getting non-destructive editing through adjustment layers, which is such an indispensable feature for important projects
it's not like you could ever just copy layers or something. That's never been a feature in gimp, not once.
I understand your point, but to act like that is the sole thing stopping people from using, is kinda silly. (idk maybe i'm wrong and adjustment layers are this incredible feature, with never before discovered productivity benefits or something, i'm assuming not though)
They make things so much easier, having to make copies of every layer every time just to keep the original in case you need to re-do something half an hour later is super annoying.
Especially if you do multiple different things with a layer. Do you really have the patience to make backuo copies of a layer after every little edit you apply to it?
And then let's say step 2 of 5 didn't turn out like you want. Backup copies or not, you still have to re-do everything from 2 to 5 because of GIMPs destructive nature as of right now
oh so it's basically like a COW fs but for graphics editing? That's pretty slick. I'm sure you could implement something fairly similar to that natively, though it would be a decent bit of work.
It's going to be part of the 3.0 release, after what feels like an eternity. The 2.99 dev release has it already, I might try that
Actually, I'd much prefer a FOSS alternative of Affinity Photo instead of Photoshop.
I'd be happy if the Affinity suite worked on Linux :(
yeah, I'd totally pay for it.
Just like MS Office.
Exactly... easily replaceable but you have an endless whining of users that imagine they might somehow in the future need this one feature that office has but alternatives don't.
That's an increasingly small number, if only because now Google is in that market, too.
However, there is a second reason you need Office, and that's compatibility. I don't use Office for work normally, but I still have an Office account (which, annoyingly, is how you pay for Office now), because I have clients who want to work on their formats and it doesn't make sense for me to work around compatibility and have an argument about it instead of just paying for the damn thing and working with whatever software other people want to work.
But if I was by myself and didn't need to work with anyone else ever? Yeah, I would not miss much from Office, honestly.
But if I was by myself and didn’t need to work with anyone else ever? Yeah, I would not miss much from Office, honestly.
That's my position as well. But there are certain features that I do require for work and other integrations with other MS products that you can't get elsewhere.
As you said if one lives in a bubble and doesn’t to collaborate with others then native Linux apps might work and might even deliver a decent workflow. Once collaboration with Windows/Mac users is required then it’s game over – the “alternatives” aren’t just up to it.
Windows/Office licenses are "cheap" and things work out of the box. Software runs fine, all vendors support whatever you’re trying to do and you’re productive from day zero. Sure, there are annoyances from time to time, but for most people they’re way fewer and simpler to deal with than the hoops you’ve to go through to get a minimal and viable/productive FOSS-only experience. It all comes down to a question of how much time (days? months?) you want to spend fixing things and dealing with small compatibility issues that simply work out of the box under MS for a minimal fee. For most people paying for MS and doing their job right away delivers a better ROI than going FOSS and then doing their job while dealing with the small details.
I object to that "work out of the box" comment. I have lost more work hours to OneDrive being terrible than to any single other technical reason. Office has at least as many quirks and inefficiencies as any of its alternatives.
It's a bit of a standard and it doesn't... not... work? So yeah, it's the go-to you have to have as a fallback for things to not get annoying when you work with multiple other people outside your same organization on something. Alternatives are as good or better, though, especially if you consider commercial ones as well as FOSS ones.
But yeah, it's priced just so that it makes sense to pay for it and not use it over not having it ready to go when you need it. On purpose. Which sucks.
Windows is a different story. Quirky and annoying yes, but not more so than the alternatives and definitely the standard for big chunks of things in ways that it's not trivial to replace.
Teams is also the meeting system furthest from "just works" in my experience. Not sure where all the Microsoft apologists get those ideas that stuff made by Microsoft "just works".
But yeah, it’s priced just so that it makes sense to pay for it and not use it over not having it ready to go when you need it. On purpose. Which sucks.
Yes, marketing. Microsoft is good at it.
I don't even know if I give them that. I guess pricing things just at the edge of you begrudgingly buying them instead of going elsewhere is "marketing" if you squint. I mean, by all accounts they're worse at branding than Apple and worse at PR than literally everybody else in their competing markets. After a certain critical mass it probably doesn't matter much, I suppose. At least not short term.
Well by definition it's marketing. Communication, branding, PR are just some disciplines of Marketing, pricing definition is another and you can always be at the "edge of you begrudgingly buying them" then you're good, very good at it.
Photopea. Not foss, but a free clone of photoshop.
idk honestly i just don't think i really believe this take.
The only really objective aspect of it is going to be user complacency. It's possible you've been using PS for 10-20 years now. And switching seems like an impossibility. But honestly, given the feature set, or the non existing feature set, i don't think it really matters.
Ultimately you can still do graphics editing in GIMP, and you can still do graphics editing in PS, it's more about your adaptability and flexibility, rather than skill set, and software. I've used both photoshop, gimp, and photopea. They all do the same thing, photopea is worse than either. GIMP is more featured, and doesn't come with adobe, PS has AI editing, and probably like 2 other features, and also the copyrighted color pack that you have to pay ransom for.
They all work fine, stop complaining, you'll live. Maybe that's just the doomerism peaking through or something, but honestly, it's such a vapid complaint IMO.
It does seem like a hopeless situation sometimes. I used to be a graphic designer and honestly it is very difficult to switch to any other program that is cohesive. Especially with the addition of AI features in Photoshop (keyword, I know, but generative fill can be extremely helpful in some cases). The Affinity suite is barely even able to keep up, and they have employees that are paid. Cross-compatibility and file type standards are a massive issue too, let alone the functionality itself
Also would be nice to have open source ecosystem with blender ,then open source pro level video editing like da vinci and open source photoshop.
I'm happy to give Black Magic Design my money.
I literally wouldn't piss on Adobe if it was on fire.
I haven't gone back to Blender's built in editor and postprocessing suite. I hear they did some stuff to it in 4.0.
Still, yeah, I end up going to DaVinci because Blender editing is more like Gimp Photoshopping than it is like Blender 3D modelling and rendering.
A decent language learning type app, like dulingo
grindr
Stylus/handwriting oriented note taking. Stuff like Samsung Notes or Goodnotes (or OneNote, though it does a lot more) in the Android space, or e-ink options like Remarkable's stock software.
If I just want to use a keyboard for everything I have great FOSS options like Joplin and Standard Notes, but when I want to use a pen instead it feels like no other freedom-respecting option seem to even remotely approach the usability of just sticking with real ink and moleskine-like paper notebooks.
Even someone willing to pay an upfront fee for proprietary apps will struggle to find good options that allow syncing and reading (let alone editing) your notes on other devices/platforms without resorting to a monthly subscription.
I tried Saber (https://f-droid.org/packages/com.adilhanney.saber/) for a while with my fat fingers and it worked good enough for my use case, idk if it fits your needs
Thanks for the recommendation. I'll give it a try sometime.
Have you heard of Rnote? It is only available for linux, windows and mac tho
Yes yes yes 🙏 I swear I go around at least once or twice a month looking for this. I'm not sure if it is a huge technical feat to approach this type of program or not, but like you said there are tons of options for typing but I haven't found even one that solely focuses on handwriting.
Try this. Still under active development, but I like it so far.
This is a totally wild card guess, but I imagine obsidian probably has a community hand writing extension
it's also closed source.
You know, I always forget that
An alternative to iTunes so that I don’t need a Windows VM to backup my company iPhone. But I know it’s never gonna happen because Apple is the devil.
Just so you know, libimobiledevice can backup iPhones with their idevicebackup utility. It's CLI only, so maybe not as easy to get into as iTunes but it has worked pretty well for years on my end.
Yeah thanks I’ve read about it but the terminal part is probably above my really modest Linux knowledge for now.
That's fair enough! I can tell you it's not that difficult but having a nice iDevice suite desktop application would certainly be a big improvement!
honestly terminal isn't that complicated, if you're surviving using a VM at the moment, you could probably manage to comprehend a terminal for long enough to figure out how that software works (and as a benefit, also figure out how basically every other CLI application works)
Thanks for the advice, but, for now, I can’t picture myself managing a professional phone backup without a GUI.
Had it been just a tinkering phone maybe, but not my professional one😇
honestly it's no different than using a GUI, unless your place of work mandates a specific piece of software or something. It's not like you can't fuck shit up, but you can also do that with GUI apps too. I've fucked up more shit using a GUI than using CLI. That could change some day, but that's what backups are for.
Good news, Apple has the solution for you. You don't need iTunes anymore.
https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9np83lwlpz9k?hl=en-US&gl=US
Yeah but I’d still need an Apple program and a Windows VM, so it wouldn’t change a thing 😅
- Digital wallets (for things like cc, ID, coupons)
- Map apps (like google maps)
- Dating apps
For maps, there is already OpenStreetMap and its ecosystem. I particularly like OrganicMaps which is available for Android, iOS and Linux (beta).
OrganicMaps works really well even with Apple Carplay. I’m now a 100% relying on it.
OsmAnd
Catima for a digital wallet
That doesn't seem to support credit cards
"Maps": as others have suggested: OsmAnd and OrganicMaps (I use OsmAnd as it covers my needs better than Google Maps or other apps)
"Dating Apps": There is Alovoa
but the problem is who you will find on there, as everyone is on other apps
I know them all but they can't hold up with their proprietary counterparts both by userbase and features.
Haven't tried Alovoa, but think of it differently; if someone is on Alovoa, they maybe are more similar-minded to you, because they too probably like open source stuff.
I like your "the glass is half full" attitude, however their signup seems to be broken.
Ah, rip, that may be an issue😆
Discord. And no, Matrix/Element isn’t an alternative.
Software for the production of music and audio, like Ardour but for more platforms which more typical people could use more easily, plus plug-ins for that ecosystem. It's a major sticking point how corporate that field is for me.
Full on Transit app that works well. Most that do are closed sourced and the ones that are open do not work well. A traffic app would be good but that would be very resource intensive. So not holding my breath.
Dating websites
SnagIt!
Flameshot is great, but it lacks too many features I've come to depend on from SnagIt! and I would absolutely pay for a Linux port even if it isn't FOSS
I would love to see a good Lightroom alternative in terms of ease of use.
Darktable is great and the results are good, but it's pretty complex to use and has a really steep learning curve. And it doesn't do photo management other than a few basics. Even after months of use I still struggle to replicate what I can do in Lightroom.
Swiping library and keyboard.
Yousician or similar entertaining musician motivator. One that has scoring or analysis, specifically. Not just a video/backing track player.
Some kind of buy/sell/auction/freecycle system service/app/front-end that isn't evil and it's simple enough for normos to use so it gets critical mass and makes it easy to buy/sell/give/recycle stuff locally.
HeliBoard. Swype library must be downloaded and currently only working ones are closed source but the keyboard itself is open source and amazing.
I've just switched this week from SwiftKey, which was the best keyboard I have ever used. Made the switch just to abandon a piece of proprietary software, but oh boy... HeliBoard has way exceeded my expectations!
FlorisBoard (at least the beta) is getting there (swiped on FlorisBoard), though it's not quite there yet
Streamlabs, Streamelements and Elgato, Logitech and Razer's software. Typically applications for streaming and content creation
I don't see anyone talking about it here but I'd dream of an open source alternative to AndroidTV/Apple Tv. Firstly because ATV is ultra-dependent on Google, and secondly because the interface is unclear and not really pretty.
Today I've switched to Apple TV, which is much better in terms of UX, but the OS is too closed and sideloading isn't possible...
So I hope to see some sort of CalyxOS / LineageOS for Tv arrive one day!
YouTube
Fusion360
Tried out FreeCad/Ondsel, and just couldn't get it to cooperate. Trying to do even basic changes would constantly result in errors/crashes. I spent maybe two weeks trying to make a single model. Then I tried making the same model in Fusion360 and was done in an half an hour. Granted, there is a huge difference in experience level here between these pieces of software, but still.
So I think my best bet for now is a jailbroken copy of Fusion360.
Google Keep
My wife and I use it all the time for things like grocery lists, packing lists, etc. It's nice to be an able to collaborate in real time on a checklist, and I haven't found an app that can replicate that convenience.
Snapchat and Google Docs are the only two non-FOSS apps I can't shake off.
It would be cool to have a Snapchat clone based on Briar.
Google docs because I don't trust myself with my own data, I always end up delteting important documents cause I save them to random locations when cleaning house. Having it all in once place, with autosync, search and a nice powerful mobile interface is really convenient.
Certainly not as powerful as common office suites, but https://cryptpad.fr/is not only open-source but also has already running instance (and has end to end encryption for your documents)
https://syncthing.net/is a good general file synchronizer. Requires devices too be online simultaneously to sync, but gives you transport encryption with forward secrecy.
I can relate with trusting yourself with data 😂😅 would love to self host Immich, but I have continued to make silly mistakes and would 100% screw myself over if I had all my eggs in one basket with just a home server for files. At the moment I managed to completely degoogle and settle on Proton Drive, which although far from perfect, has been significantly improving (no Linux client yet though 😐). Syncthing has been looking more promising too. Maybe one of those could work for you?
Try having your self hosted services backup to an external (or at least a separate) drive, where each service has its own folder.
Are there cloud providers of OnlyOffice? That's the best FOSS option IMO. LibreOffice and OpenOffice were OK, but not nearly as good.
I would really like an open-source alternative to Facebook. The connection idea with friends via a social network platform I like, the bots and ads and force fed (propaganda) news I really don't like.
Plus, an open source Facebook would really hurt Zuck and that's also a win.
personally for me it'd have to be remote desktop software, don't really need it myself, but being an SSH jockey, the day that i can do that but with remote desktop, and without it looking like a jpg, or needing to compile tigervnc specifically for it or some shit like that will be a good day for me.
I realize it's partially dependent on hardware, and that hardware sucks, so sometimes it just sucks. But SSH just works so well though.
Beeper
Canva.
Their feature set and functionality is great, but their vendor lock-in is really off-putting. Even just within their platform, it's really difficult to move assets around within workspaces.
Let alone edit graphics that you made on Canva and edit them elsewhere, say Penpot, for example.
Oblivion as there currently exists the Open Source Version of Morrowind
Tasker, Photopea, Perplexity.ai, Quick Cursor and A powerful alternative to Powerpoint. (I used to be a Powerpoint nerd)
It'd be nice to have some kind of FOSS business suite, aka point of sale, accounting, inventory etc. I'm not a fan of Intuit.
I've also not found journal software I really like. RedNotebook is about the closest. I tend to use my journal not only as a personal diary but also as a place to brainstorm and I would also like a checklist/to-do list system, and this I haven't found in any software free or proprietary. I may have to build it myself, with my rudimentary knowledge of qt.
Universal Paperclip
It's the dumbest thing, but right now I just really want a better open source alternative to Advanced IP Scanner. Or I want someone to add a filter (especially by MAC) option to Angry IP Scanner. Whatever. I just want an IP scanner that can filter by MAC and works on Linux.
Two categories, broadly: any professional software, with deep features and professional quality.
I know theres audacity, but that's really not an acceptable saw.
I know theres a few cad apps, but no professional I've ever met finds the good enough.
I know gimp, and I use it, but no artist I know does; they all pirate Photoshop. Literally every one.
I like having audacity to record audio. I like having gimp to fuck with shit. I like having various cad apps to bang out organizational tools to print. These things do generally fit my use case. But I still have to help people pirate everything else and god the DRM is do fucking annoying.
Abd here's the more esoteric ask:
Not so much programs as features; Why aren't we really going all in on shit we can do that they can't? Features capitalists would never add, never support? Instead I find open source software always playing catch-up, and theres no reason it has to.
For X/Twittwr there are many options but Mastodon(mastodon.social instance specifically) it's my favorite, it also works as an alternative to Facebook.
I just feel a lot better with Mastodon rather than X/Twitter
Parallel Desktop
There are several FOSS alternatives. All of them are more popular that Parallels.
are you talking wine, virtual box, quemu and such? Im pretty sure he is looking for usage like parallels so dual booting a mac and then running it from the mac side. I mean im not sure but thinking from a parallels user perspective that is my guess at the ask.
For macOS, I recommend UTM.
For RSS I recommend twine—not sure if it's available on Mac os though. That's always going to be a struggle with foss stuff, support for Mac is lacking because the people making them tend not to use macs
For Copilot, Codeium might have potentional?
Vivaldi is open source I guess.
Of the three layers, only the UI layer is closed-source. This means that roughly 92% of the browser's code is open-source coming from Chromium, 3% is open-source coming from us and only 5% is our UI closed-source code.
Vectric Aspire for my CNC work.
Suicide booth
they did? totally slipped past me...
As far as I understand the app menue, tracking is an opt in.
Is OrganicMaps not a good alternative to OSMAND?
Not happy with OrganicMaps? It's my personal favourite at least, and completely open source. Probably depends what your needs are. :)
Just don't check the box?
Organic maps is quite nice.
What and why is Osmand tracking us. Are they actually selling that data. I had completely missed that. Weirdly didn't get and email...
TransMac. It's a tool to create MacOS install discs and USBs. It works off of a limited time free trial then you are supposed to pay.
It works great but I'd prefer something FOSS.
Doesn't that require a computer running MacOS to run?
s/one/thing/
It may sound boring, but I would appreciate a good open source alarm app for android.
What's missing from the existing ones?
I have serious sleep issues so I heavily really on my alarm app, I need features like:
- wake-up captcha
- wake-up time randomising
- the ability to load a playlist, or play a podcast episode
- sleep tracking
I miss Timely oohhh soo much
I have had success with the Simple Alarm Clock on F-Droid (not to be confused with the simple mobile tools apps). It has necessary basic features like custom alarms, increasing volume, and dismissing the alarm requires holding down "dismiss" so the chances of accidentally dismissing an alarm instead of snoozing it are much lower. The only time it seemingly failed me was after an overnight android update (samsung), where it didn't work until the phone was unlocked.
Exchange and Outlook for business use.
No nothing else comes close.
It’s the last app in MS Office that does not have competition. LibreOffice fills ever other app well enough but nothing comes close to exchange and Outlook. Considering they are trying to kill it off with an always online website (OWA) we need foss competition asap.
Waze
Substance Painter. Material Maker will get there but its development has stalled quite a bit.
Dating app. An app that help people metting each other based on their interest and purpose local activity. :)
Something actually good to replace Google Docs, the current alternatives are either paid or not feature complete (or both).
OnlyOffice
True, I caved for Proton Drive for lack of a better option right now. Even then it is not feature complete. However I'm happy enough with Google not mining my data anymore
I sometimes needed something like powerquery from microsoft excel. To like quickly get specific data from a structured file.
SOLIDWORKS. FreeCAD is hostile.
Hostile? The FreeCAD community is great
Onsdel is a fork of FreeCAD with UI improvements. Much better in my opinion. They actively contribute back to FreeCAD as well.
Krita & OpenToonz handle just about everything I need as an animator/artist, but I'm worried about OpenToonz continued development. I worry that there aren't enough people working on it.
A clean redshift application for Android, like redmoon. I found something but it's not quite there.
I would love to see an Open Source alt to AlchemyRPG
I love using their scenes when playing DnD online, but their privacy policy leaves a lot to be desired
AirPlay projecting to other devices. I only see a tool to receive projections
@ClearCutCoconut
Here a list of comments to the same subject on f-droid forum:
forum.f-droid.org/t/what-types…
Notion + OneNote/Samsung Notes
There is a myriad of open source notes apps, but none of them really hit the spot for me.
Have you seen anytype? Its a nice alternative to Notion
Yup. It looks promising and I've tried it a few times, but it still has a long way to go before it can replace Notion for me. Also, self-hosting it is a complete mess right now, definitely not ready for everyday use.
Same, been eyeing and testing Anytype since alpha, and honestly it doesn’t feel intuitive at all. I tried, I really did, but it just feels like I’m going against the grain in every way to try to use it in daily life in its current state :/ don’t get me wrong, I love their values and what they’re trying to do. But it feels so convoluted at the moment
appflowy.io is getting really good as a notion replacement
Have you tried Affine.pro?
Didn't know about that one. I'll check it out, thanks!
Edit: Windows/Browser only, no mobile app :/
Yeah, true. Not sure if there's any unofficial mobile apps maybe. Affine has said that mobile is in their long-term plans, but nothing available yet.
What features do you feel are missing in the open source options?
There always something missing, like
- Not available on all platforms
- No sync, or only to some corporate cloud service
- Missing formatting/linking/calculation/organization/sharing capabilities
- No/Limited/Only drawings
- Clunky/Unfinished/Buggy
Every app is different, but I have yet to find one that ticks all the boxes.
Apple Remote Desktop. Batch control of computers through SSH and VNC would be amazing.
like Remmina?
Does remmina let you send an ssh command to multiple computers at once? I use ARD for that almost exclusively.
maybe, allthough I need to test ARD to see how they do it.
Remmina allows you to run a command on connect, or set up individual commands to execute
Yeah I tested it out. The feature in ARD that I am referring to is that you can do any of the main functions (observe the screen, copy a file, install a file, run a terminal command, shut down, etc) to any number of computers at the same time. You just shift click command click to select multiple computers and then press the button associated with that function. That you can't do is control multiple computers at the same time, since that wouldn't really be practical, but you can observe all of their screens and then double click on one of them to start controlling it.
Really the most useful thing here is the ability to send an arbitrary terminal command to multiple computers at the same time, which you can't do in Remmina.
So I tested Remmina some more, and yea, my expectations for the exec plugin were broken. It only runs commands locally, I really thought it was for sending saved commands remotely.
I guess ARD is king, at least from the solutions I know of. Personally, I achieve the "see all screens (or well ssh connections)" and the "send command across all connections" with tmux. And if I need RDP, SPICE or VNC, I use Remmina.
Windows users can use Royal TS, but that is paid and proprietary.
Apple remote desktop? Apple doesn't support RDP. They do have a VNC client built in however
Partiful / evite. There’s not much out there that’s a good simple replacement.
MobaLiveCD its freeware but as far as I can tell it does not have a foss license.
It's a long shot, but a viable alternative to Google Maps or other proprietary mapping websites (and no, OpenStreetMap is not a viable Google Maps alternative).
EDIT: Not sure why downvotes, OpenStreetMap doesn't even have directions as far as I can tell.
Organic Maps honestly hasn't been that bad for me, but searching addresses is appalling and I do need to rely on Google Maps in many instances still. However, it has made it much easier for me to contribute to OSM and have a better user experience. A step in the right direction at least
I use Organic Maps to find places by name and OSMand to find places by address. Both can only the do one of the two things good, but it is doable.
Is Organic Maps only on the mobile apps? Is there no way to view it in a desktop browser? The website seems to just lead me to the apps.
It's just an app, yeah.
OpenStreetMaps is amazing, but it is a map, not a whole ecosystem like Google Maps is. As a map I find it's often better than Google Maps, but what is still lacking are good front-ends implementing a wide range of functionality in a user friendly way.
On desktop I often use GNOME Maps, but it leaves a lot to be desired still and is obviously intended for Linux users running GNOME.
I don't know why it isn't mentioned anywhere on their website. But Organic Maps does have a desktop app. At least on Linux there is the Flatpak. I don't know about other platforms.
OSM is not that user friendly as Google Maps for sure, but if you really want you really can replace GMaps. It probably heavily depends on your country and if the OSM community is active there, but for example here in Germany the mapping information is basically on par with GMaps
How do I get directions with OSM?
There are many APPs build on top of OSM that can do directions in a user friendly way. Personally I use MagicEarth, which uses OSM but isn't itself open source. They include live traffic from some other nav provider.
My goal was to degoogle my phone and MagicEarth was the app which came closest, but I bet you can find all sorts of webapps or fully open source ways to get directions if you don't care for live traffic.
Gotta look at that. Live traffic info is one of those things, that OSM lacks...
Is there no browser version? Do I have to get the app?
MagicEarth is only an app.
If you want web based OSM routing you have to look at other services which there are many of. Here are some examples:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/directions
https://routing.openstreetmap.de/
https://maps.openrouteservice.org
On the wiki you can find a lot more:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Routing#End_users:_routing_software
Visit openstreetmap.org or osm.org for short and where you can search for a place there's an icon with arrows beside it. Hit that and then you can put in the From and To. You can pick car routing or bike routing or walking.
But no public transit?
AFAIK someone is working on it. But the problem is the high dynamics of public transport. Routes and schedules get changed quite often, schedules might be quite irregular (think only Sunday at 3:14). And all that data has to be stored offline. Stops might be changed do to construction work for a week. And that is in the optimal case: In some countries the bus comes when it comes, and stops if it wants to stop.
Currently you can see where the lines of a bus or the metro go, but that's about it, I think.
You have to use an app for that. OSM is mostly a big database with an API access to it. There are a lot of them out there with a lot of different focusses. For navigating with a car OSMand is pretty good. They are on fdroid.
I use brouter to route on OSM.
The thing is, OSM is not comparable with GoogleMaps. OSM is just a (gigantic) database and is in many cases way more complete than GoogleMaps. What people usually associate with OSM is a rendered version of the database focused on what ever the renderer decided: bike lanes, waterways, hiking trails, etc. Many other apps actually use their database: OrganicMaps, Komoot, etc. And even more their rendered tiles. Now there are so many functionalities that this database doesn't do like geocoding (searching for adresses), reverse geocoding (getting the adress of a point) or route planning, but there are tools for it build on OSM data. e.g. Nominatim does geocoding and graphhopper does routing.
And to be honest, if you're travelling by bike graphhopper does a way better job at routing than google. An other plus, you can download the complete data for offline usage. All of Europe is only around 60GB.
The thing is, OSM is not comparable with GoogleMaps.
I mean... Yes that's literally what I said. I don't know if there is any of these apps that really provide all that Google Maps provides. But I'd be interested if they do.
They will never do, because they are not trying to. AFAIK no one is trying to build FOSS reviews of restaurants/stores, no one is building street view and no one is saving where you live to make the one click from work to home route planning. For me, those are not functions that I need (or want). I need a map that works offline, does route planning (offline) and allows me to display multiple GPX files at the same time.
Does OSMAnd have all that? It does, so for me it's an alternative. What use case do you have?
Osmand does have a plugin for open reviews or something and I think I saw there were plans to use another source too. I guess, on top of photos from Wikimedia and mapillary it is trying to become a bit like Google Maps in a way...
There is also a plugin for mapillary street view that doesn't work too bad.
Only missing a Web app for desktop.
Directions using public transit for instance.
Public transit navigation is possible in Osmand but there will not times just the routes and only if the data is present in Openstreetmap and that pretty rare, really depends where you live.
You are supposed to use an app and not the website for navigation and generally looking 1t the map.
On android the best two IMHO are Osmand and Organic Maps but depending on what you what there are others. Many on F-Droid. Osmand also has an ios app.
What if I want to look at the map in my browser though? I like to plan ahead on my desktop before leaving.
As far as I know there is unfortunately no good webapp using OSM.
I guess graphopper is probably the best but I don't personally like it that much. You can create a route with it 1nd send the gpx file to your phone and open it Osmand and then follow that. It's nothing like using the Google maps feature send to phone or email because you can't really modify it then.
That sounds much too complicated yea
There are some commercial animation studio softwares that don't have any equivalent AFAIK.
Scrivener!
The frustrating thing is that, at least for me, there are no perfect word processors geared for novels and other scenarios where you manage large text masses.
Scrivener is one of those cases where you have a pretty excellent software that doesn't have a lot of problems OSS alternatives have. I have smooth time with it. But at the same time, the software always could be better.
Probably the best OSS novel writing software I've used is Org-Mode for Emacs. But, you know, it's based on Emacs, so it squeaks around the edges and gives the impression that it's a miracle it runs as brilliantly as it does.
Final Cut Pro. I know it’s asking a lot and I know a lot of talented people have tried and are trying to build NLEs and all my gratitude to them. But—no offense intended—none are there yet and actually accomplishing this would be #1 on my magical (no effort provided by me) wishlist.
Blender has spoiled us with unrealistic expectations.
SnapGene
All my installed apps are FOSS
Shapr3d
YouTube, and one technically exists in the form of PeerTube, with PlasmaTube being a good client for PeerTube.
YouTube really isn’t anything without the content and I’m not sure how open source will solve that.
In the case of PeerTube, not worrying about Google age-gating or straight-up yanking your content if you tick them off is a good start, basically, you'd actually own your content posting on PeerTube instead of YT.
That is a good thing but at the end of the day that makes someone money how? The platform has to work for everyone even the professional creators.
YT's ad revenue only pays out fractions of a penny, if you want to make money on content creation, you're better off doing that through crowdfunding eg. with BuyMeACoffee, and that revenue stream is platform-agnostic.
Also, PeerTube's design basically allowing you to own your content can work out well for hobbyists which already have some other income source as well, better than being at the mercy of Google.
It’s a chicken or the egg situation. However you make your money you need eyeballs and they’re currently not on PeerTube. Millions of people visit YouTube everyday. That’s a lot of chances for discovery. It’s a very small percentage of people willing to limit their exposure for the things you mentioned and without loads of content it’s hard to grow and truly be an alternative to YouTube.
@ClearCutCoconut WhatsApp
:blobfoxsignyes:
What about Signal?? I know it's not perfect but it seems like more people are using it each year. Whatsapp really has the majority of the market though, and it is so difficult to get people to change messaging apps (in the US at least, where I swear 95% of people have an iPhone and a superiority complex)
@ClearCutCoconut Yes, exactly.
Signal is nice but there is a lot of communication in Whatsapp.
It's still relevant to this question, but I don't think the problem is the app itself. A new app likely won't help solve this problem
Cloud backups are on the way and I imagine that will help give Signal a boost
Completely agree. At this point it seems like it just needs time for the momentum to build (more and more users vouching for it). I didn't know they were adding cloud backups, that's great. Usernames have been helping too, I think!
I Don't have WhatsApp anymore. Though I just deleted my WhatsApp account and said that I am no longer reachable via that crap. If you want to contact me use Signal. Most of my friends just installed Signal (a few took some time), but if you don't do it that way you will never get away from WhatsApp just because of the network effect... And yes, you will miss out on some groups
I appreciate this mindset. Sometimes you just have to go cold turkey
did the same but with Threema
The fragmentation is really shit. I wish more such APPs would be interoperable.
I've had Threema for a while even before that, because my family group migrated there. Though I do not have a lot of contacts on there :D
Let's see if Loops can fill the gap. Not sure if an open source alternative could generate enough hype to be viable - maybe if TikTok is banned in the US or something.
Holy smokes! I was an avid TikTok person for music before they enshittified it with ads and the shop features. Can’t wait for Loops!
My problem with Loops is the same problem I have with Pixelfed. They are both only maintained by the same one guy. No team, no support besides him. Its only a matter of time before they are dead in the water due to burnout or shifting interest.
Apparently it's the same guy doing both from the headline. Didn't read the article to be honest.
Surely as it does have a user base somebody would take over in that case even as a fork for brand reasons or whatever.