@aschrijver You’re right about sticking to open source. When it’s not fully open source you never know what the real intentions are.
DuckDuckGo for example they’re for-profit just like Google. They made an estimated USD $7 million revenue last year which supports 45 employees. DuckDuckGo tries to make the appearance that they are different, but are they really? They are funded by venture capital, and the founder previously made $10 million by an SEO website which listed random names and name misspellings in the web’s wild days. So we have to be very careful. Many services imply they are doing good, but are they humane tech? Or just a slight improvement, or just an alternative to the big monopolies?
I wouldn’t trust any company with investors, that’s for sure.
And slowly the list is growing. Some nice additions:
Privacy
Fair Analytics - A Google Analytics-alike server that doesn’t undermine user’s privacy.
Privacy Respecting - A curated list of privacy-respecting Services and Software.
Hosts - Consolidates several reputable hosts files, and merges them into a single unified one.
Blocklists - Shared lists of problem domains people may want to block with hosts files.
Hosts and Blocklists are nice (and sometimes better) alternatives than ads/tracking blockers.
Parents may consider this as a means not easily detected by your tech-savvy kids
Blocklists contains very specific hosts file examples that explicitly block e.g. everyting-Facebook.
Social networks
News Feed Eradicator - A browser extension that replaces your Facebook news feed with a nice quote. (thank you @ariadnemm)
Two more additions to humane tech. One is a beautiful substitute for Google Analytics. Measure exactly what users are doing on your site or in your app, without invading their privacy by having Google aggregate and collect all of this information.
Privacy
Matomo | - The leading open alternative to Google Analytics that gives you full control over your data.
Thank you @john! You maintain a very nice list. I have added it to the ‘Related awesomeness’ section
Would you be willing to include a link back in your ‘Other lists’ section and/or a link to CHT in the ‘Organizations’ section? That would be great. I can PR if you want…
Related awesomeness
Free Software - A curated list of free as in freedom software.
The latest addition to is a browser extension that automatically strips Google Analytics (UTM) querystring parameters.
What are those? They are added by many sites that use Google analytics and are automatically added to URL’s in the page, and also come from links you copy from mail messages. They are the utm_* statements after the question mark on the URL. Google uses this to determine that the URL came from you. For this purpose it includes ID’s and the like. Anyone clicking such link will send the parameters to the domain specified in the URL, where Google Analytics picks up this information.
When you use URL’s elsewhere having these parameters then Google can detect that and track you across sites, as well as the people who click on them (and determine those you have reached by your link sharing).
Privacy
Tracking Token Stripper - Browser extension that strips Google Analytics (UTM) tokens from URL query strings.
I am not sure, to what category Validbook should be added. Although, primary service among Validbook Services is Validbook social - a social networking service. Validbook as whole is not just and mainly not about social networking. It is based on a more abstract, higher level paradigm of optimizing cooperation levels among humans, things and virtual entities. Functionaly, it is a set of cooperation services like - service to create Self-Sovereign Identity, Digital Documents Signing Service, Social Networking Service, etc. More in this post - Validbook - a universal platform for cooperation
Sorry for late response, but I had been away from the forum for the summer and just now see your post.
It is a great initiative that you are developing an OSS alternative social network, but unfortunately I cannot include Validbook on the list. Criteria are that the system is in production, actively maintained and has popularity in terms of contributors and/or uptake. This is for larger systems.
I generally do not intend to make awesome-humane-tech an extensive list of all social networks that are developed in the open. There are other awesome lists for that. I’ve made some exceptions for networks that are especially popular (like Mastodon) and/or have specific properties, like being decentralized/federated (also Mastodon).
Some entries on the list are not all that mature, but they constitute small codebases, utilities that concern specific Humane Tech areas, like getting rid of your news feed on Facebook. Code in these projects could come in handy e.g. when including in larger projects.
Your project could maybe find a better location on some of the lists I mention in Related awesomeness section.
I have been restructuring and extending the awesome-humane-tech list a lot, without providing updates here. So here is the full list as it currently stands:
Probably not about Habitica in particular (though you could join their.forum and ask), but I guess there should be studies on the effectiveness of well-designed gamification efforts to change habits. There are many practical applications that are very successful in reaching their particular stated gamification goals.
Note: I have used Loop Habit Tracker for a year. While not gamified, getting daily reminders about your habits are a good way to give them proper attention, I found.
Thanks. I asked as my very screen addicted 17 year old has not been able to use such personal screen behavior trackers, mindfulness/screen use apps,nor apps that actually lock out/shut down social media et al use — including those recommended on the humane tech webside. She either doesn’t use them, or deactiviates them. We’re reluctant to use some of the hard core parental control software as she. Is going to have learn to regulate herself in college very soon.
Announce: awesome-humane-tech has moved to Humane Tech Community !
I have started awesome-humane-tech as a personal project at github.com/engagingspaces, but have now decided to move the repository to the community’s Github organization:
And I’ve included some more additions…
Censorship
OONI Probe | - Observation network to detect censorship, surveillance and traffic manipulation (first read risks).
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