this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2021
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Disclaimer: I know that being a developer is hard, I'm not trying to say that people should start doing these ideas to please my desires. I just thought it was fun to have a list of ideas that could improve the libre software community and these are some of them that I would really love to see. If you have some other Ideas contribute as well, and if you are a developer and you are looking for something to do but don't know what, you may gain some inspiration from here.

Projects that do not exist:

  • Libre and privacy respecting alternative to DeepL. Details: I know there are already some libre translators, but I will not stop using DeepL until there's something as good as it.

  • Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Genius. Details: It's a website where users create community based lyrics for their favourite artists and can create annotations and add metadata.

  • ~~Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Goodreads. Details: It's a website where you keep a log of what you've read, what you want to read and what you are reading, you can also rate books.~~ Here is an alternative.

  • Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Grammarly. Details: It's a set of applications or add-ons that help you with typos and it will improve your text.

  • Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Letterboxd. Details: t's a website where you keep a log of what you've seen and what you want to see, you can also rate movies and TV shows.

  • Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Pixabay. Details: It's a website where you can get images to use without copyright restrictions. I know CC has a website for this but their content is really poor.

  • ~~Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Push notifications.~~ Here is an alternative.

  • Libre and privacy respecting alternative to ReCaptcha.

  • Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Shazam. Details: It's an application that tells you what you are listening if you let it listen to it

  • Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Unsplash. Details: It's a website where you can upload and use photos of people that are licensed under a license that allows for use under most circumstances for free.

  • Libre and privacy respecting mouse gesture and ~~radial menu~~ to an operative system level. *Similar to Gesturefy and ~~CompassMenu~~ but in a way that it can work in any application. Look this video for more details since this is probably a really deep and hard to explain topic. Here is an alternative for the radial menu.

  • Libre and privacy respecting website where to upload and download 3D models licensed under a CC.

  • Libre and privacy respecting website where to play a lot of different card games. Details: Similar to Lichess. I am satisfied if you only can play poker until it gains some traction.

  • Fully libre and privacy respecting alternative to Xayn. Details: It's an application that recommends you articles based on the input you give to the algorithm. Some of its code it's liberated on GitHub, but not all of it.

  • Libre , decentralized and privacy respecting alternative to Imgur. Details: It would be great if this could work along the fediverse, for example people would host images there instead of here on Lemmy or Mastodon, making these platforms much more lightweight.

  • Libre, privacy respecting and not self hostable visual bookmark manager. *Details: There are a few alternatives here and there, maybe, but they are really awful looking and generally you need to self host. I don't know how to self host and it would probably make my machine slower, I would prefer something that someone's alreay hosting. This is exactly like what I'm looking for, but they haven't launched it yet since they don have enough resources, it could die, too, maybe.


Projects that exist but have some issues:

  • A set of common android apps. Details: I know there are a are a lot of basic Android applications to replace the default ones that come with your phone but I feel someone should create a set that align the aesthetics of them to be coherent with each other. I know Tibor Kaputa does this, but in my opinion I would like something that looks a bit more modern and that has more features, since theirs are based around minimalism. For example, the camera application does not have as many options as my default one, etc.

  • Libre, privacy respecting, aesthetic and functional map application. Details: I haven't been able to find a working application to see maps, I generally end up using DDG's in browser map because of this. The only one that worked was one calle Maps which was a fork of a really good one (but it was filled with proprietary and other shady stuff ) but it stopped working after some time. I mention the aesthetic parts because I want to be able to recommend this to people who wouldn't use it otherwise if it looks like something really "primitive".

  • Revive waifu2x as a serious project. Details: I really love this website, but I really hate the whole idea of the waifu thing, it is misogynous and I feel like unprofessional.

  • Libre, privacy respecting and highly customizable home launcher. Details: I know there are a ton of home launchers for Android, but most of them focus on minimalism or simplicity, I don't want that, I want a super customizable full of features application that can let me do almost anything. The closest to this was Lawnchair which is dead, luckily Omega launcher exists now and it looks like it'll be able to achieve this, but it's not there yet.

  • Revive AquaDroid Details: It is a really beautiful application but it has some bugs, not so many features and development has halted.

(page 2) 31 comments
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago (1 children)

What about a FOSS alternative to Netflix? Something without tracking, DRM maybe... :D

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago

The most important I can think of is a libre alternative to the Metaverse...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Grammica is one of best tool to check your sentence structure and lot of text related tool.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago (1 children)

Most of this stuff already exists. Deepl - Libretranslate; Letterboxd - Episodes (F-Droid); Pixabay - Search Creative Commons...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago (2 children)

Thanks for the recommendation of Libretranslate and CC, regarding Episodes that's only for TV shows, not movies, and it's all offline, I would like to meet other people through the platform like you can do in Letterboxd.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago (1 children)

For the Imgur one, you could use the LBRY blockchain, since it supports any file.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago) (2 children)

Regarding GoodReads I also know inventaire.io :)

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago (1 children)

alternative to Genius

Wouldn't it be complicated with copyrights and stuff like that?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago)

I don't know how much you can DMCA that kind of stuff, I know there are a lot of small websites that host lyrics and I know Genius scraps all the lyrics websites it can and uploads it to its database (I was a mod there and I've seen some lyrics literally being copies with the same typos and that kind of stuff from other lesser known websites). Also I think you could get some help from the EFF or something, maybe.

Still, regardless of the difficulty I think it's worth it.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago) (1 children)

I feel a bit like no matter what alternatives we will propose you will say that doesn't count because is isn't as good or as popular as the one you mentioned. At least that is what your text sounds like.

But anyways there are already many FOSS solutions for the issues you have. Here are some examples quickly off my head, but I would say 80% of the above exists more or less.

https://bookwyrm.social/

https://gotify.net/

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/09/fly-pie-gnome-extension

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago (1 children)

Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Push notifications.

Wouldn't that just be web sockets?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago

On iOS, this is a non-starter. The system suspends your app after a certain amount of time in the background, and closes any web socket connections whether you like it or not.

You might be able to make it work on Android (I have a lot less experience working with Android than iOS), but the trade-off is that if every one of your apps is holding open a network connection for its own push notifications, that would impact your battery life. Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) from Google, and Apple Push Notification Service (APNS) both work by funneling all notifications through a single network connection to the user's device.

And for what it's worth, FCM just proxies messages to APNS when the client is an iOS device. Not even Google can create a true alternative for push notifications on iOS.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago (1 children)

There was someone who participated in FOSDEM a couple of years ago and presented an open-source push notification server for Android that they were working on, but seems like the project has become stagnant. If I remember correctly, they wanted to combine it with MicroG somehow as an easy way to take push data from apps.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago (1 children)

Ohh, that sucks, it looked like a really awesome project. Still someone else mentioned Gotify, I haven't had the time to look into it yet but maybe that can already achieve the same?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago

Gotify works fine, however of course it isn't that well integrated into the OS.

The problem with alternative push notifications basically boils down to the fact that the very purpose of push notifications systems in Android/iOS is to have only one long-running process with network access and hibernate all the other programs. This is one of the main reasons these systems appear to have better battery life than alternatives.

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