I shared a version of this guide earlier this year, but felt a website was needed to unpack the different options fully. So after an unreasonable number of hours, I put together the necessary data and website.
I hope this is digestible enough for the average person to help those looking to take that first step, or for people who are equally passionate and want to get their friends or family involved.
Details:
- Site - https://purchasewithpurpose.io/
- Code - https://codeberg.org/purchase-with-purpose/pwp-website
- Community - https://lemmy.world/c/PurchaseWithPurpose
Every time I post these guides, there is always feedback on things that can improve, or I got wrong. Please do share, as it is the best way for these to evolve!
KDE is friendlier to Windows users than GNOME, but Mint is still a good option.
And KDE is predominately German.
Good choice! But for search engines, you missed SearX, Startpage, and Brave Search. SearX is a search engine where you can choose your favorite search engines to get results from various search engines privately, and you can also host it. Startpage is a search engine where you can search Google anonymously and without being spied on, and Brave Search is Brave’s private search engine that uses its own search results. Stop trusting DuckDuckGo, it depends on Bing, and if you click on one of its ads, you will be exposed to Microsoft tracking. For messaging, it’s fine, but you missed Session, which is a messaging app that doesn’t require a phone number and is anonymous.
Thanks for the feedback! The website goes into this level of detail and includes some of those suggestions you had: https://purchasewithpurpose.io/
Hard to include all of this in the graphic alone, but will consider how it can be improved.
i thought you had stopped recommending protonmail and spotify but i see now both are back (spotify not in this image, but (with caveats) on your website).
i see you’ve been making these images for many years and obviously put a lot of time in to it - i assume that like most other ethical consumerism campaigns you must have some funding for it? (from who?)
The guide has had many iterations, and you are right that at one point, they were entirely removed. I’ve ended up informing rather than hiding, as most of these names are already known, whereas not many people are aware of Spotify’s actions (for example). Proton is a little more complicated - I personally won’t use them, but I can see the nuance where some people might.
I don’t get any funding. I am a developer myself, so I do 80% of the work. The rest is self-funded and will continue for the foreseeable future.
i don’t understand what motivates you to do so much unpaid labor to market/advertise/recommend commercial products and services which you yourself would not even use.
You’re kind of described almost the entirety of FOSS. It only exists because there are talented people who make shit and give it away for free. I’m glad they exist.
I also like OnlyOffice as an alternative to MSOffice/Google Office Suite, has free tiers and real-time sessions
Yup, an excellent option and it is listed on the site. https://purchasewithpurpose.io/category/office-suite/
It is worth noting the potential ties to Russia as that has been a deal breaker for some.
Why Tidal? I get the part against apple, but why tidal?
Tidal
It is hard for me to be the arbiter of what tools are ethical enough, so I try to make these facts as easy as possible to find for people. In the end, it educates and ultimately most decide against using such tools (for example, Spotify). There is a note on Tidal’s profile about Jack Dorsey’s and Jay-Z’s involvement. https://purchasewithpurpose.io/software/34R8h9DOVPhaJ7CZMmKW48/
That’s kinda why I was asking I remember something about Dorsey a while a go
Great guide! Very useful for people discovering a world outside of the GAFAM’s.
I’ve done everything, but leaving Whatsapp is the most difficult one. I use Threema and Signal with my close friends, but I can’t get rid of Whatsapp because of many groups I have to follow but I’m not close enough to people to ask them to switch.
I’d love it if these two chat services proposed a separate app which would be interoperable with Whatsapp.
Yes Meta would still get some of my data, but less than if I had Whatsapp directly.
Also getting Whatsapp business and setting an automatic answer asking people to contact me through mail, sms or other chats is useful.
Leaving youtube is also difficult as Peertube is lacking non tech content like basketball…
Why does every search engine look exactly the same, and push the exact same AI chat feature, and have identical options for filtering arranged in out in the exact same order in the exact same location.
I think there’s only one search engine.
People are all copying what they are familiar with, and that is Google. I list the providers that have AI Summaries as part of their offering; you can find one that doesn’t. https://purchasewithpurpose.io/category/search-engine/
Probably because it’s the same use case?
That’s like asking why all keyboards have the same letters in the same arrangement, with mostly the same options.
If you want something different, try Kagi. It has other controls you don’t see elsewhere
I see Qobuz on there. IMHO, Bandcamp should be your first stop when buying music. If it’s not on bandcamp, Qobuz seems to have just about everything else, more or less, that someone might want. I’ve complained about them in the past for making me download my purchases one track at a time, which can be pretty annoying if you’re buying a super-duper-deluxe version of an album, but, I am pleased to say, they no longer do this; you can download the complete albums you’ve purchased in a zip file. But only once. Stuff can disappear for annoying rights reasons, and I think they even say, once you buy your music download it immediately, because it may not be there on a subsequent visit.
I’m not so sure. Last time I looked for an album it was cheaper on Qobuz than Bandcamp - also Qobuz had a Hi-Res version. Bandcamp I think takes 15% + payment handling which seems a lot for being a shopfront. I went to record label to get it in the end as I thought that was probably the best way of getting the money to the artist.
I don’t know where this would fit in on the website but one company that is really important to boycott is Oracle. Larry Ellison is a mega right-wing donor and his son is buying up media companies for the purposes of turning them into right-wing propaganda machines.
One way everyone can make a difference is by uninstalling any Oracle software on your computer. You might have the Oracle JRE installed or if you’re into virtualization you may be using Virtualbox. It’s especially important to avoid Oracle software in a corporate setting because their lawyers may come after you. If you work for a company and you’re either involved in purchasing software or a software developer I would strongly recommend avoiding Oracle not just because of ethical reasons but also because typically they have their products are not as good from a technical standpoint as well.
For the Oracle JRE or JDK you can replace it with Adoptium. Adoptium is run by the Eclipse Foundation which is based in the EU.
For Virtualbox you can replace it with QEMU or Xen. For QEMU there are a lot of good GUI or CLI front-ends that make using it easy. See this article: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/QEMU/Front-ends note that some of the front-ends listing in that article also support Xen.
I use the VirtualBox stuff all the time! Time to look for a replacement…
Oracle definitely fits under the tech giants to boycott… and also fuck Larry Ellison. Will keep this in mind for future tools, but feel free to post this on https://lemmy.world/c/PurchaseWithPurpose in the meantime.
I posted it there! Before I was worried to post there because I didn’t see any recent posts.
I was just thinking, one way to start adding Oracle might be to create a Database section and mention Oracle’s database and perhaps other closed source/bad solutions like Access and suggest open source alternatives like PostgreSQL and MariaDB.
y no searxng?
They are on the website :) Just too many options to include them all on the infographic. https://purchasewithpurpose.io/category/search-engine/
What’s wrong with Safari?
Big Tech
Missed that part?
Reddit -> Lemmy is a recent switch that I’m happy with
I am very bothered by the OS section. Bazzite should be the go-to for gaming, period. Ubuntu should never be recommended to anyone. Fedora is far more stable and reliable as a starter distro than either Mint or Ubuntu. Fedora Workstation for Mac expats and Fedora KDE for Windows expats.
I won’t fault anyone for putting Mint in there, but I loathe Cinnamon and would never recommend a distro that excludes KDE by design.
agreed, bazzite, nobara, and cachyOS would all have been better alternatives to popOS
I’d normally have Pop as as more of a starter distro, although I haven’t been recommending it lately just because it’s in a bit of an awkward spot in crossing over from GNOME to COSMIC. Not that I dislike COSMIC, I just wouldn’t want a newbie to install the GNOME version and then have to go through switching their whole DE right off the bat.
COSMIC is supposed to hit 1.0 in the next few days and I’m looking forward to it. I wouldn’t recommend it right now only because the beta still has too many rough edges. Once it’s more polished, Pop_OS it could be an excellent starter distro.
Anyone have an alternative for Google Keep? I just want shared notes and checklists across all my devices
Joplin maybe?
Upnote or check out a new one called Lockbook
I recommend notesnook
On the list, will get there maybe in 2-3 weeks time! But if you want something sooner, maybe post on the community https://lemmy.world/c/PurchaseWithPurpose
If you need markdown and other formatting you can use notion.so, but I can’t expect that company will be good in the future even though they’re good now. They’ve already added AI. I use it for a note-taking because I can create hyperlinks between notes.
What stumped me is that YouTube music and apple music are the starting point, and not Spotify.
Also isn’t using your own Mailserver with your own domain on any webhoster plus Thunderbird a viable alternative? I’ve been doing this for like 20 years. That’s the beauty of email imo
