The internet of the 2020's is a nightmare dystopian hellscape only foreseen by the likes of George Orwell and HP Lovecraft. You will require 20 cm of solid tungsten plating and a high-intensity coherent X-ray light source to have any hope of browsing it without dying of syphilis soon after.
alternative-front-ends
is a helpful list of front-ends for popular services.
Here are some other tools that may help keep you sane just a little longer.
neomutt
I haven't really bothered to set this up but it seems nice
simplelogin
provides randomly generated email aliases to protect your email address.
firefox
is still the browser you should probably be using. open source since forever, it has the best communities around it.
brave
if you have to use a chromium browser, use brave. there is still some pretty dubious stuff going on surrounding an innovative and commendable, but ultimately doomed business model, but it's mostly a good browser. by far the most objectionable thing is the use of promotional images in new tabs by default
tridactyl
is an incredibly powerful vim-like user interface layer for firefox. Of course, somethings still break it because browsers.
vimium
the closest thing you'll get to tridactyl
for chromium browsers, but vastly inferior to tridactyl
.
uBlock Origin
the best add blocker
User-Agent Switcher
because lots of sites sabotage themselves just because you're not using Google
ClearURLs
cleans up URL's, a sometimes overlooked piece of the surveillance infrastructure
Cookie-AutoDelete
one of the best extensions. whitelist the few cookies you are willing to allow, delete the rest automatically as frequently as you want. also good to use in conjunction with firefox container tabs.
privacy-redirect
re-direct web services to various non-dystopian front-ends (e.g. invidious, nitter).
privacypossum
does some cookie blocking that is entirely redundant with uBlock and firefox and brave built-in protection, but also does some fingerprint protection.
decentraleyes
re-directs "content delivery network" requests to local sources where possible to prevent spying.
TabSessionManager
I'm definitely not a "trillions of tabs" person but these days this seems like basic functionality that all browsers should have, though it's usefulness is severely undermined by the inability to control it with tridactyl
.
invidious
is a YouTube front-end written in crystal.
FreeTube
is another YouTube front-end.
NewPipe
a really good YouTube front-end that's sadly only available as an Android app. definitely best option right now for mobile though
nitter
a front-end for twitter. not very useful as twitter is a cesspit, but sometimes you'll get links there.
youtube-dl
. Makes a nice combination with mpv
.
mps-youtube
a terminal based YouTube front-end. uses youtube-dl
and mpv
.
peertube
a P2P video hosting network. Recommend the privacytools.io instance.
~cadence/tube
uses CloudTube with second
as a YouTube front-end. instance here
Though so Microsoft has not done anything outrageous with their stewardship of Github, the service has nonetheless shown itself to be terrifyingly vulnerable to censorship. Ultimately we will need a P2P E2EE replacement for Github and the like, but for now, here are some alternative git hosting services.
GitLab
where this is hosted. I would say the features here are even better than github
sourcehut
a git hosting service with a wonderfully minimalistic web front-end. it is a paid service, but worth keeping an eye on.
gitea
seems to be an open source clone of github. access the main instance here.
radicle
is a P2P E2EE git protocol. currently in the nacent stages of development, but looks promising