What apps would you love to have open-source alternatives for?

ClearCutCoconut@lemmy.world to Open Source@lemmy.ml – 269 points –

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?

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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

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.

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

I couldn't get goofcord to work on Wayland but webcord works great

Didn't know those existed.
Aliucord looks like a modified client tho, so not really open source.

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

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.

https://github.com/cabal-club

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