[Raion]

I decided to write this as a guide to help unplug users from Big Tech/Corporate Internet and provide them with good, well researched alternatives to major tech companies. There will be a mild level of commentary from me as well, and that does openly play into my recommendations. 

Operating Systems

The big three (Windows, macOS, GNU/Linux) are heavily corporatized, and increasingly GNU/Linux is a poor choice due to corporate interests from everyone, including Microsoft. The Linux Foundation is a threat by its very nature. 

Outside of this, the options are a lot more relaxed, but come with various drawbacks:

Haiku - Not corporatized, relatively easy to use. Limited software and hardware pool.

OpenBSD, NetBSD - Both aren't corporatized, have a higher learning curve, limited technologically compared to Linux and FreeBSD, and may struggle with non-FOSS friendly hardware. 

FreeBSD - Has some degree of corporatized interests and increasingly has diverged from its older goals. However, has the best hardware support of the BSDs.

illumos - Unfortunately behind the pack, but another potential option for some people. 

Out of the big three, I'd say, honestly, microsoft windows is probably the best balance of ease of use, and not locking a user down. macOS is anti-power user, and GNU/Linux is magnitudes more difficult for even simple tasks for a great many users. 

Search Engines

Seriously, get off Google. They're the worst offender. 

Ecosia -  Germany-based search provider with anonymized searches and more reliable ranking in my experience compared to DDG or Bing

DuckDuckGo - Uses Bing and Yandex to help rank itself, but has some level of search manipulation (they don't rank sites they consider to be content mills) and has had numerous controversies.

Startpage (formerly lxquick) - An aggregation search engine as far as I can tell.

Out of the big four search engines that are corporatized, Baidu and Yandex are the only options that don't go directly to American big tech, but both Yandex and Baidu go to foreign governments, so use at your own risk.

Browsers

Don't use Chrome, the main build of Firefox, Safari or Opera. There's dozens of better options:

Vivaldi - For Linux, Windows and macOS users this is my top recommendation. It's clean, fast, has nice built-in features, and it carries Opera better than Opera does anymore. 

Brave - It's a decent webkit browser, with some neat features. In particular, BAT (basic attention tokens). I also have partnered with Brave on irixnet.org - they won't show ads because I'm not a fan of that noise, but you can tip us BAT and it'll go to the site. 

Waterfox - for Mozilla users, use this or GNU Icecat. The main firefox build supports and advertises Mozilla, whose been increasingly political in recent years. They fired Brendan Eich for being a conservative Christian, they support RiseUp, a group associated with antifa and other terrorist organizations, and have been openly pushing a partisan agenda on issues that do not concern the internet itself.

Palemoon/Basilisk - I'm not as big of a fan of these guys, but they do offer a compelling alternative. In particular, their BSD attitudes were shitty beyond belief. 

Midori - for Linux users, a decent option.

Email

Zoho - India-based tech company with an office suite and email attached. A million times better than gmail/google docs IMHO. 

Protonmail - Swiss-based pro-privacy email service.

Mailbox.org - Another Protonmail-esque service

Mailfence - Heard about this from a friend, only briefly glanced. Looks okay at a glance. 

Wiki alternatives

For reference, I do not hate Wikipedia. I do, however, think the english Wikipedia plays into biases more often than it cares to ever admit. I use Wikipedia regularly, but knowing of alternative is perhaps useful:

Scholarpedia - A rather slimmed down, but academically minded Wikipedia hard fork. Basically a more formalized academic Wikipedia. 

Citizendium - A rather inactive Wikipedia fork, really a huge shame. 

Infogalactic - A Wikipedia fork run by Vox Day claiming to be objective and to not allow editorialization on issues. While I do not agree with Vox Day at all, I have found through talking with contributors from Infogalactic they're more open-minded and friendly to a large degree. Several reviewers do seem to agree with the mission but not the politics of every aspect. 

Out of these, I do contribute off/on to Citizendium and sometimes to infogalactic, the latter mostly on Japanese and Chinese subject articles. I find the fact that they are more open and free with sources and less likely to editorialize and smear people to be a better way. Citizendium would be nice, but it's mostly dead (Check out how most articles are stubs). Infogalactic is more complete, and until I get my articles manhandled like I did on Wikipedia, I'm good. 

Social Media Alternatives

This is probably even more controversial than the inclusion of Infogalactic... here goes:

Wt Social - WikiTribune/wtsocial, founded by Jimmy Wales (wikipedia founder)

HackerNews - Yeah, I like this too

Minds - A distributed social network that is run by Bill Ottman

Parler - A censorship-free social network similar to Twitter. I do not use Parler myself, because of privacy concerns, and because I only slightly rank this over the likes of Gab; which I'm not gonna plug here at all because it's shady as hell. 

Mastodon - Technically a software rather than a singular thing, but it's a federated social networking service where you can connect to other instances.

Forums to consider

Besides your friendly irixnet, there's a bunch worth looking at:

EAB - English Amiga Board, a favorite of mine from the Amiga community

VCFed - Usual VCF forum suspects

The CoffeeHouse - A relaxed, shoot-the-shit type forum

[defaultrouteuk]

This is a great list and well appreciated!

Nothing to add except potentially for searching: https://searx.github.io/searx/

It's a PRIVACY FOCUS search engine aggregator you can self-host and may offer advantages over the usual suspects.

Regards

[Raion]

Removed the most recent posts because they were non-topical. Further posts from this user in this topic will be removed unceremoniously. Please do not make me into an asshole people.

The entire point of civil discussion is to discuss things dispassionately.

[GeekLucanis]

I understand of trying to move away from current social media- the main problem with that is that most of my friends aren't going to change from what they know. I've joined quite a few of those smaller social medias- and most are effectively dead or have minimal users.

[Raion]

I thought I would include it just for the people interested. I'm personally not going to give up on discord as of right now, but once Mattermost irixnet is online I'm going to progressively move off of it.

I think the more important thing is to be using email, search engine, and browsers that stand up to your convictions both morally and socially. For those who disagree with me you probably are in most agreement with big tech already so it's not really a post that's targeted specifically towards them. It's mostly for people who have had it and want something different. It's my Hope in the future that I can be part of a greater movement to bring the internet into a more uncentralized state. Big social media claimed to unfragment communities and bring people together but all it really has done is give a semblance of that while allowing people to self segregate and have this delusion that they are truly diverse. Meanwhile forums in my experience you're going to find a lot more people who are on a more reasonable disposition and less narcissistic towards themselves.

[soviet]

Always was a big fan of BeOS, used it on powerpc first and later on intel even after the end of the company.
Have been following Haikuos development for maybe decades now?, wish it could be more developed its real nice to run.

[Shiunbird]

If there's interest, I started successfully hosting my own e-mail (at home, with failover to Amazon AWS - puke) and I can write a guide if there's enough interest.

The backend doesn't matter too much. I managed to set everything up by gluing all the components manually under FreeBSD, but I found mailcow to be a much easier way and has great features, such as automatically creating disposable aliases.
My firewall logs don't show that mailcow does anything shady.

I'd cover mostly how to get everything set so the big providers won't reject your email as spam and make sure you can receive e-mails fine at home too.

My friends professional emails are at my place already and everyone is super happy.

[shrek]

I understand of trying to move away from current social media- the main problem with that is that most of my friends aren't going to change from what they know. I've joined quite a few of those smaller social medias- and most are effectively dead or have minimal users.

I used to feel that way too, about family and friends being on social media. These days I just call people and schedule a day to get lunch or go fishing or something else. I've found that having face-to-face conversations makes the discussions I have with them richer and more meaningful. I never struggle anymore to find things to talk about since we aren't following each other's every move on social media near daily.

[vishnu]

I wholeheartedly agree with not doing business with corporate Linux, I've only ever used Slackware which if anything is the exact opposite of corporate Linux. And speaking of Brave, their anti-google anti-bing search engine is in beta at search.brave.com

[Raion]

I'm gonna do a second edition of this with some updates. In light of things that have happened since then I feel I have a responsibility to make a new version!