Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Hosted Alternatives To Proprietary Monopolistic Services
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2020 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
Videoconfencing:
Document editing and sharing:
I wrote to the tech-coop list talking about what I need in a Google Docs replacement, thus kicking off a thread where a few people recommended various NextCloud arrangements. I found out that a Dutch host named The Good Cloud is offering "its services, including the privacy-friendly Nextcloud Talk, free for 3 months for all companies, organizations, government institutions), schools and organizations." Currently I use a mix of Etherpad, GitHub, Google Docs, GitLab, Dropbox Paper, HackMD, and probably three other things I'm forgetting. Again, I aim to move as many of those as possible toward free services and away from proprietary ones. At some point soon I should probably get a Nextcloud instance, either paying someone else (preferred) or doing it myself, and see how it does for this sort of thing.
(Followup to a related post in March.)
Edited the same day to add:
Oh yeah, another few things I had in my open tabs:
Several projects at switching.software.
Collective Tools is one of the co-ops offering Nextcloud hosting and support -- as well as Rocket.Chat and Deck (a kanban board application).
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