Guide to the small web

This is a guide I made to move away from big tech companies, primarily due to privacy and ethics concerns. I'm simply doing this out of the belief that the law hasn't caught up with the technological developments of the 21st century leading to lots of unethical practices. So, let's start this with a disclaimer: I am not omniscient. If you have anything to add to this document, please contact me about it. If any information on this page happens to be wrong or outdated, please contact me about it as well. Also understand that with "small web" I mean moving away from a corporate-owned internet in which every website looks the same and where you are the product being sold.

This is also just a lot of reading and information in general, so I've split it up in multiple pages. Use the footer or box on the right to navigate through them. I'm also aware that my font may not be the most fun to read a lot of text in, so I've used Open Sans instead.

Last note: I cannot be bothered to fully document on this website why and how the companies I call shit are shit. A lot of it has to do with the danger of monopolies, exploiting users and most of all a lack of ethics. I may write my manifesto another day, but it can wait. This is solely a way for me to try and help people out given my concerns with the modern tech industry. Heed my advice or don't, it's up to you.

Getting rid of Google & Microsoft

Google has a massive quasi-monopoly on so many things, and because of it, they can afford to worsen their product for the users. About 10 years ago, maybe a bit further back, Google Search was the best it has ever been when it comes to being a Search Engine. Google's engineers used advanced machine learning to scrape together their search index, which is still algorithmically maintained today. For context; said search index is simply a database containing a ranking of the most popular search results by keyword and search query, basically. There's still a lot of things that happen before AND after accessing the search index.

Google was also sitting on mountains of user info through their searches. They started selling that to advertisers and making advertisers pay to show up at the top of the search results. Originally they told you these were ads. Nowadays they don't anymore, and Google's AI overview is god-awful and will most likely be used for ads and propaganda as well somewhere in the near future. In contrast, Google Scholar and Google Patents still have the top quality search results Google used to be known for. Next in line is of course Microsoft, which is Google's partner in crime. Where Google holds the majority, Microsoft is the follow-up and vice versa. So, how do you replace a monopoly?

Search Engines

Let's start with the biggest one. There are numerous alternative search engines: Qwant, Brave Search, Ecosia, DuckDuckGo and quite a few others. I didn't find any that don't have an AI overview, but at least you can turn them off. They all also use Google's search index, as their is no alternative yet... but Ecosia and Qwant are working together on a European-made search index, so that's nice. None of these tick off all my checks though; I don't want search engines to store my cookies, but the AI overview tends to be on by default, and without cookies they can't keep it off. So instead, I use DuckDuckGo Lite. Lite is an alternative to HTML which was made for areas where internet access was slow. As a result, DuckDuckGo Lite doesn't bother with anything other than the search results, like a search engine should. For image search, I recommend Tineye.

However, as of writing this I've been made aware of a Dutch search engine called Startpage, which has no AI overview and is privacy-focused. Still uses Google's search index as well as contextual advertising (no targeted advertising though), but you can't have everything in life. Mojeek is a UK-based search engine that actually has its own search index, and they're privacy-focused as well. They still have an optional AI summary, but they have a much more nuanced take than other search engines just slapping it onto everything. Swisscows also exists and uses some special features, but they've recently made their search engine a paid subscription service, so I can't tell you if it's good or not. I'll also mention YaCy for the fact that it lets you make your own search index and web crawler bot, even if they just use a shittily context-engineered ChatGPT for their support page.

Besides that, many browsers also have a feature where you can select and use one of multiple saved search engines, including searching through your browser history. the term search engine is used loosely here, since basically any website with a search bar can be put here. This is really handy for many topics and websites, e.g. Wikipedia, and avoids having to waste more energy than necessary by using a search engine.

Bookmark stuff too. Organize your bookmarks into folders. The more you learn to work with bookmarks, the less you will have to rely on a search engine.

E-mail

A company needs to save your emails on a server somewhere. The thing is, do we trust them with that data? I know I sure don't, I've used both Outlook and Gmail before and both of them suck in my opinion. My knowledge on email competitors is a lot more limited than my knowledge on search engines, unfortunately, but there are quite a lot of them.

The first is Thunderbird, which is owned by Mozilla but in some weird way independent from it. Thunderbird is a pretty good email service from what I've heard from its users. It has a lot of other functions too, like a way to chat with other users, a calendar and contact book and even a news client. I like it's premise a lot, but I am currently using something else. Tuta and Swisscows email have free accounts in their subscription tiers, StartMail and Kolab Now do not.

Proton Mail is owned by the Swiss company Proton AG and it's what I currently use. It's privacy focused and has everything you need. There's limited free accounts (Proton runs on a tiered subscription system) but for me such an account is enough because I regularly clean my mailbox out. I'd advise you to do it too, there's a lot of data in there that you probably don't need. The reason why I use Proton Mail and not Thunderbird is because Proton AG has a lot of other useful services, like Proton VPN or Proton Drive, which we'll get into further down the line.

Cloud Storage

We are now further down the line. While Google Drive has a lot of things associated with it, like google spreadsheets and google docs, what service does it really offer for the common citizen? Data storage. Cloud-based data storage and the ability to access it from any device with internet connection, like OneDrive and DropBox. Microsoft is a stain on this planet so OneDrive is a no for me, and DropBox has come under fire for security breaches numerous times in the past decade and a half.

Some alternatives I've got on this front are iDrive and Proton Drive. iDrive is a paid service, but even the lowest subscription tier offers you a terabyte of data, so if you need terabytes of cloud storage, iDrive is a steal. Proton Drive on the other hand has a free tier with 5 gigabytes of data storage, which is more than enough if you go about cleaning it every once in a while. Proton Drive has Proton Docs too, but it's very limited compared to google docs and consumes a lot more data storage. Luckily for you, that's what the next section is about. Sync.com is a Canadian cloud storage provider and although buggy, it's pretty good on the privacy front. Nextcloud is based in Germany and I've heard some pretty good things about it. It's got an AI assistant though, which I of course don't like. MEGA operates from New-Zealand and is very good on the privacy front. It's mainly a paid service and the free plan is pretty confusing. Cryptee is a European cloud storage provider with a very large focus on privacy, and I respect them a lot for choosing to square up against Apple at any given opportunity.

Workspace & Office programs

The mainstream goto applications for working on one document with multiple people are Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets, the other things Google has and then the entirety of Microsoft Office, which is the de facto standard for companies. I have to use Word and Excel and Powerpoint for university, but I don't use Microsoft Office. Uninstalled the 365 app and I just use the standalone apps via the browser, which is a bit wonky at times but is good enough for me. That way I don't need to have OneDrive installed either, piece of shit program.

There's one alternative you'll always want to pick when it comes to office suites and it's LibreOffice. It's got everything Microsoft Office has but it's free, it's maintained by a non-profit organisation and is completely open-source. And yes, you can in fact work on one document with multiple people. Long live LibreOffice!

Youtube

I admit I actually know no good alternatives to Youtube (except PeerTube, but adoption has been slow. I'm not even gonna link Rumble since it attracts so many right-wing AI bros, and Odysee is built on cryptocurrency and the blockchain). Like many things, it's a quasi-monopoly. But Youtube of course isn't a required service, and the way the company handles user data and the way it treats their content creators (their free money generators) is dubious at best. Youtube has slipped into everyone's lives though, so I don't expect you to get off of it in an instant. Best I can do is suggest Youtube Revanced to get rid of Youtube's enshittification. Invidious is an open-source self-hosted way to view Youtube. Turn off your youtube history, it practically resets the algorithm and deprives you of a homepage (which is good, showering you with recommended attention-grabbing videos is how they get you). Without an algorithm, you'll also be able to see more just how quickly youtube tries recommending you polarizing content, which was really scary for me when I first realized that.

Best practice is to use Youtube as little as possible. The company is doing a lot of unethical things quietly and is a pawn for Google to push its generative AI into everything. I don't watch shorts, I think the format has awful consequences and is a great way for companies to grab your attention and feed you whatever makes you stay glued to your screen and nowadays it is filled with AI-generated slop. My advise is not to consume any short-form content in succession. Don't click on the Instagram Reels tab, don't scroll further down on Youtube Sorts, and for fuck's sake don't use TikTok.

One more thing; try to watch at lower quality. I watch youtube videos in 360p. You don't need high quality often times to enjoy a video. Around 5 years back, 80% of all internet traffic was video files because of how large they are (so about 4.8 Zettabytes). I imagine that amount has increased a lot in recent years.

Browsers

The thing is that while Google Chrome holds 66% of the global market share when it comes to browsers, there are a lot of alternatives. Problem is, a lot of them are ass too. Anything that runs on Chromium is shit because it wastes RAM like nothing else. I used Firefox for a while, but then they changed their terms of service so that anything you upload via Firefox becomes Mozilla's property, for the purpose of training Generative AI. Edge sucks as well because it's Microsoft-owned. Safari is bad for the similar reasons, but every iOS browser has to use Safari behind the scenes, so if you use an iOS device: I'm sorry for your loss. There's some other sections in here later down the line about good alternatives for Apple's hardware products.

When I said there were a lot of alternatives, I wasn't kidding. Starting with non-mobile browsers: Tor Browser is a privacy-focused browser, and probably the mose unique one since it uses the Tor network, using their own unique routing protocol that differs from traditional internet usage. I've never used it myself. Still, I've heard a lot of good things about it, so it's worth a try. Mullvad Browser is based on Tor and is owned by a Swedish VPN company. DuckDuckGo has a browser too. Brave is privacy-focused as well but is built on Chromium. A lot of the best browsers in my opinion are based on Firefox, since Firefox was originally open-source and there are a lot of forks of the source code which became their own browsers, e.g. Pale Moon or Waterfox. Librewolf is the one I currently use, it's free and open-source. There's some settings that are turned off by default on Librewolf that are on by default on Firefox, so that's something you mayy have to look into, but pretty much anything you can do on Firefox can be done on Librewolf. Cookie storage is also turned off by default for all websites, which I find to be very useful. It's easy to turn it on for specific websites you use a lot, too.

For mobile browsers, the options are limited. Many are discontinued, and the aforementioned iOS Safari bullshit doesn't provide any help. ThunderHawk is one promising mobile browser that was discontinued a while ago, as an example. I generally don't use my phone for internet browsing, so that sort of solves the problem for me, but I know not everyone can do that. The aforementioned DuckDuckGo, Tor and Brave browsers are available on mobile (Tor on Android and Linux, the other two on Android and iOS). There are other popular options too, but I haven't had the chance to explore them yet.

Git platforms

Fuck Github. It's easy to use and is free to some extent, but if that's the only thing you're interested in for hosting git repositories, you're better off using GitLab or Codeberg. GitLab's gone all in on LLMs so I dislike them for that, even if they aren't owned by big tech companies. Codeberg's a non-profit which runs on donations. In 2022, it cost around 1050 euros per month to keep it running, so if every member (not user, you don't have to be a member to use Codeberg) donates 1 euro to it, they have money to spare. Definitely my preferred choice, highly recommend it.

IDE's for software

Shoving this one in here since it's already crammed with technical info. I'm a CS engineer who hates big tech, I'd talk about VSCode and Visual Studio eventually. Like with most Microsoft shit, they're full of telemetry, and the push for Copilot is very annoying. Once you disable the telemetry there isn't really an ethics issue anymore if you want to use it, but I for one don't feel quite comfortable with it still, even as I write this in VSCode (I am still looking for a suitable replacement). Though I don't know any general-purpose IDE's like those by Microsoft, JetBrains tends to have really good IDE's for less general purposes, like PyCharm and CLion. They unfortunately also have their own LLM model, but at least it was trained on permissively licensed code unlike Copilot. Eclipse is also a pretty good IDE, and while it's primarily used for Java applications, plenty of plugins exist for almost 30 other languages too. Once you go further down the pipeline, things start getting very limited very quickly. It's not uncommon to see people coding in text editors like NeoVim and even Notepad++ due to their extensive plugin support (if you need a replacement for Microsoft's Notepad, I highly recommend Notepad++). Still, I'll be on the lookout for more solutions and will be listing any IDE's I come across in my web directory.

Authenticator

I don't use any authenticator apps. Not the biggest fan of them, and while multi-factor authentication is the most secure, there are other ways to implement it than just with an authenticator app. Still, if you do use them, I've got a few alternatives that may work depending on the situation. Authy is the most known option, but a 2024 security breach has harmed their reputation a lot (and deservedly so). LastPass is also a known password manager which features an authenticator, but it was recently found to have a serious security vulnerability which hasn't been patched yet. YubiKey is a hardware-based authenticator which tends to be a lot more secure, but being a hardware-based solution there have been a lot of issues which you don't see with internet-based authenticators. FreeOTP is the last one I know, and it seems pretty decent, but I've never used it myself.

Calendar

I prefer to keep a small notebook on my as a physical calendar. For some reason, e-mail services usually offer a calendar as well. This includes but is not limited to Proton, Thunderbird, Kolab Now and Tuta.

Photos

I genuinely don't get Google Photos, it seems like such a useless service to me. It's completely encompassed by general cloud storage services + decent folder management. If you need a service to share images via link, Imgur is still really good. I don't know much about Piwigo and Lychee other than that they can be self-hosted, which is a pretty nice option ot have for any cloud-based software.

Translate

Though it's always better to learn the language, nowadays we're encouraged to always use a translator service. There's two types of translation software which you need to differentiate between: model-based and dictionary-based (these aren't formal terms). Model-based translation services are quite recent technology that use neural networks, a type of machine learning model or AI which isn't necessarily Generative AI, to translate words and sentences. Theoretically they should be more suitable for sentence translation than the dictionary-type translators at the cost of more energy use. DeepL is such a service, headquartered in Germany and the supercomputer used for its translations is stationed in Iceland and uses hydropower. It does offer an LLM-based writing service unfortunately. Operated by the same company is Linguee which is a dictionary-based translation service (compare DeepL and Linguee and you'll see the difference quite quickly). Other basic dictionary-type ones are dict.cc and for Dutch-speaking folks vertalen.nu. Glosbe and Forvo are dictionary-based translation services which go the extra mile by also adding audio. They're really handy when you want to learn a new language and want to check pronunciation.

Analytics

I don't use Google Analytics or similar services, so take these alternatives with a grain of salt since I know very little about them. This is about the time for another reminder that you may contact me on neocities or the accounts linked on my homepage if you want to add to this guide. Now then: Plausible Analytics is an open-source EU-based website analytics platform. Clicky is GDPR-compliant and privacy-focused. Matomo is the biggest free and open-source web analytics platform with a large focus on privacy. Fathom Analytics is another open-source one on which I couldn't find anything else other than that their cat drawings are pretty cute.

Maps

Though the existence of Google Maps and GPS has worsened the navigation skills of the general population, I think that has largely to do with the sattelite features, since map-reading skills have also eroded. Thus I'm not particularly opposed to maps software, partially because I've got the autism flavor that likes looking at maps. OpenStreetMap is mostly just a giant openly accessible database maintained by a large community of volunteers, and I love that it really is just a large map of the world with few extra features. If you do want some of those extra features, OsmAnd is a Netherlands-based app that does just that while using OpenStreetMap data. The free version is useful and the paid versions add some neat features for an affordable price. For nostalgia purposes I also want to mention HERE WeGo, which originally was the maps app on Nokia and is now owned by a few German car companies and part of their integrated GPS system. Fully GDPR-compliant, of course.

App Store

Just use F-Droid, it's way too good not to on Android devices. For Apple's App Store on iOS devices: I mourn for the people who bought iOS devices and kindly refer them to the Devices section.