Switching.social

[wraith808]

https://switching.social/ is a list of ethical(?), easy-to-use and privacy-conscious alternatives.  I (?) ethical because that seems to be biased to the views of the site when that estimation should be in the eyes of the beholder.  But there are quite a few alternatives on there that seem to be worth looking into that I'd not heard of before.

[Deozaan]

Thanks! I perused a few of the links to see what they'd say about alternatives to a few things such as Windows, Office, and Chrome. They were all pretty much as I expected (Apple or Ubuntu, LibreOffice, and Firefox, respectively).

Also, I kind of hate the almost-but-not-quite Comic Sans font they use on their site. It makes it hard to read, IMO.

But when I looked at alternatives for Google Drive I found out about Nextcloud. I'll probably be setting up my own Nextcloud in the next few days to try it out.

[wraith808]

I saw a few alternatives to gmail that I was going to look into.  I'd heard of Nextcloud before, but not Cryptpad, so I'm going to look into that also.

[Shades]

I'm running a Nextcloud server (v13.x...still need to migrate it to v15, although v13 still gets updated) on a old Linux box. Until this point, I must say that it is a very good experience. Has a lot of features in and off itself, but can be expanded with 3rd party mods. In my setup hardly any mods have been added, I mainly use it to transfer files to it from another continent by script using CarotDAV.

For my intends and purposes it is such a good solution that I didn't bother looking at anything else anymore.

However, if you look for something less resource intensive, WebDAV is pretty simple and you could simply enable the WebDAV mod from the Apache web server software. And I'm sure it is a pretty standard feature on the other main web server software packages (IIS, NGinX). That is the most basic version of a web drive you will ever get. but not really recommended if security is of any concern. Nextcloud comes with already with pretty decent authorization options and offers more options for extra security if you so desire.

[wraith808]

https://mastodon.at/...ags/alternativesatoz

A series of toots by switching.social about different FOSS alternatives.

I currently have experience with writeFreely (excellent alternative for writing and having it federate or just using as a lightweight blog), PixelFed (Instagram alternative), Pinafore (alternative interface for Mastodon), PeerTube (alternative to Youtube), Friendica/Diaspora*/HubZilla (alternative social networks- I also use HubZilla for my RSS reader), open.audio (alternative to Soundcloud), and Cryptpad (alternative to Google Docs, operates similarly to f0dder's fSekrit but the pads are sharable). 

I don't go all in on the FOSS nor the privacy bit, but I use these because they are nice.  And the fact that you can own what you use in a different way than normal software has become appealing to me.  I don't have my own instances for all of these (in fact, right now I only have my own instance for Friendica and HubZilla), but the fact that I can do that with most of these is a really compelling idea.

[Deozaan]

https://mastodon.at/...ags/alternativesatoz

A series of toots by switching.social about different FOSS alternatives.

-wraith808 (February 27, 2019, 04:03 PM)

Looks like they were just tooting their list of alternatives from their site, and they finished going through the list about a month ago.

I'll probably be setting up my own Nextcloud in the next few days to try it out.

-Deozaan (January 27, 2019, 02:27 AM)

I attempted to set up Nextcloud on my hosted (shared) webserver, but it requires PHP 7 and my host has me on PHP 5. I was too lazy to immediately request my host upgrade me to PHP 7 so I could do this, and then kind of forgot about it for a while. I just opened a ticket asking if I could get PHP 7 on my host, and they responded by saying my hosting plan is old and doesn't support changing PHP versions, and that I need to upgrade to a newer hosting package which will allow me to change PHP versions (among other things). This will, of course, incur an additional cost, though they are running a promotion right now that will allow my first invoice to be significantly discounted to something cheaper than what I've paid the past 3 years. And they allow the option of billing for 3 years at a time, which means I'd be paid through about mid 2022. But until I make a decision on whether or not to make the upgrade, for now it means I can't Nextcloud on my host as I had planned.

I'm running a Nextcloud server (v13.x...still need to migrate it to v15, although v13 still gets updated) on a old Linux box. Until this point, I must say that it is a very good experience. Has a lot of features in and off itself, but can be expanded with 3rd party mods. In my setup hardly any mods have been added, I mainly use it to transfer files to it from another continent by script using CarotDAV.

For my intends and purposes it is such a good solution that I didn't bother looking at anything else anymore.

-Shades (January 27, 2019, 09:19 PM)

Thanks for your input. Nice to hear it has your recommendation.

In the meantime I decided to try out one of the free providers, though I'm a little hesitant to put much data on one of these free providers because I'm not sure what kind of security they use by default. Does anyone know if Nextcloud uses end-to-end encryption by default? I don't want the free provider to have access to my data.

[wraith808]

In the meantime I decided to try out one of the free providers, though I'm a little hesitant to put much data on one of these free providers because I'm not sure what kind of security they use by default. Does anyone know if Nextcloud uses end-to-end encryption by default? I don't want the free provider to have access to my data.

-Deozaan (March 29, 2019, 05:10 PM)

I am not sure, and it was one of the reasons that I haven't checked more deeply into it.  I can upgrade to the version of PHP, but the space requirement is what keeps me from hosting my own.

[rgdot]

Encryption keys are stored only on the Nextcloud server, eliminating exposure of your data to third-party storage providers. The encryption app does not protect your data if your Nextcloud server is compromised, and it does not prevent Nextcloud administrators from reading user’s files. This would require client-side encryption, which this app does not provide. If your Nextcloud server is not connected to any external storage services then it is better to use other encryption tools, such as file-level or whole-disk encryption.

Note also that SSL terminates at or before Apache on the Nextcloud server, and all files will exist in an unencrypted state between the SSL connection termination and the Nextcloud code that encrypts and decrypts files. This is also potentially exploitable by anyone with administrator access to your server. Read How Nextcloud uses encryption to protect your data for more information.

https://docs.nextclo...highlight=encryption

[Deozaan]

Thanks for that, rgdot.

[datguy]

I used several alternatives from your list. I liked PixelFed , and Cryptpad is also not bad. But open.audio I don't like, soundcloud is better for me. They also made interesting with the promotion of the account, with plays and followers, I used soundcloudgrow service and pumped my acc very fast 

[wraith808]

How many times do you have to get kicked before you realize that free services aren't free?

Dropbox has recently made a change so that you can only link to 3 devices on a free service.  And by link, that means use on a mobile device.  They spent all of that time getting people to buy into their API and share their service to get more space, and now in order to squeeze the last bit as they're entrenched are restricting the number of devices.

So how it relates to this thread... how are the sharing/syncing services here working out for everyone?  I'm definitely a lot more interested in this now.

[Deozaan]

Thanks for reminding me that I still need to try out NextCloud. I never did much with the free provider I signed up for because I didn't trust them with my data.

What are your syncing/sharing needs? Mine are fairly simple, and I don't need a lot of storage space. And I don't really sync data between many devices very often these days. It's mostly either cloud backup or sharing files.

I've been happy for years using BitTorrent Sync (v1.x) for sharing/syncing large files as needed. (I have backups of the v1.x installer files if you need them.)

I use Keybase for a few public files, but mostly for some private backups of important, but not huge, files.

For one-off sharing I've recently discovered and started using Firefox Send.

And of course, I do still have and use Dropbox, but that's mostly out of momentum (i.e., laziness).

[wraith808]

Well, I use OneDrive for most of my heavy lifting.  It's just too good of a deal not to do so.  I was using Dropbox for more of the project-centric stuff that I want to access across devices and use with Apps.  That's what my primary negative reaction to the Dropbox thing is about- it's ubiquitous in apps now.  But they're limiting it to three devices total, which doesn't really work unless you just don't have devices.  I don't know of anything that's in as many apps as Dropbox is, unfortunately.