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📆 20 Dec 2020 | ⏱️ 1 minute read

Social Media Alternatives

You don't want to miss out on social media, but you also don't want to deal with tracking scripts, ads and other nonsense that comes along with using proprietary walled garden platforms. Luckily there are publicly available privacy-respecting alternative front-ends for these popular social media sites:

Instagram - Bibliogram[1] (source[2])
Reddit - Teddit[3] (source[4])
Twitter - Nitter[5] (source[6])
Youtube - Invidious[7] (source[8])

There is also an Android app in F-droid[9] called UntrackMe[10] which redirects Youtube, Twitter and Instagram links to their free alternatives. Reddit support was just added 2 weeks ago.

I recommend exclusively using the free alternative links when using a web browser. It's also best if you send others the alternative links when sharing content. The alternatives don't always support all the features of the official website.

As a final note, Goolag[11] has been known to block Invidious instances since they drive privacy-conscious users away from youtube.com. In general social media giants tend not to be very friendly to alternatives because they want you using their official website. So don't be surprised if the alternatives suddenly break. There are always free software tools such as youtube-dl[12] you can use to avoid the proprietary walled gardens until project maintainers get the alternatives back up and running.

Links