With much political (and some legal) energy focused at major online services, and revelations of on-going 'manipulation' of algorithms and content display effecting the ability of content creators to get their message to those who have an interest in the content they provide, we have put together a list of service alternatives for you to consider.
If you need assistance with converting your content to use the new platform, please use the Contact Us form to ask for assistance.
Facebook Alternative
This relatively new service provides much of the same functionality as FB without the filtering. At first it appears that you must pay to use the service; however, there is a free tier that you can use that provides most of the 'Facebook feature' set for which you may be looking. This has also gotten significant promotion recently and the user base is growing quickly.
Twitter Alternative
This alternative provides almost all the same functionality; however, the audience growth has been a bit slow. It was originally only getting very politically conservative members. This has been changing a bit as more people learn about it.
Google Search Alternative
As has been widely reported, Google Search tracks almost everything you do, AND they use that data to fund their operations - using it fr ad placement, both on and off the Google main search site. Duck Duck Go does not use your personal data in this way.
You can easily change the default search engine that you use by setting the default within your own browser's settings.
Google Analytics Alternative
Like Google Search, Google Analytics tracks your every move on a web site. In addition to that, they use that data (in NON-anonomized ways) to target you for advertising and potentially other purposes.
Motomo is an open-source analytics system that allows the valuable tracking of activity on your web site or app without the data gathering and control by Google.
We have our own analytics service, which uses the open-source Motomo project to provide you with the stats you need but without compromising your clients data. This is a service that we provide to all clients for whom we manage their web site hosting.
NOTE: Although Motomo does provide a Cloud service, for data privacy purposes we strongly recommend that you use a private instance (like our private service) to ensure that the data collected on your sites and services remains under direct control, without providing that to 3rd parties.
YouTube Alternative
News of YouTube censoring both individual items and entire channels has been common knowledge for a while. Although there is no alternative that has the audience size or usage rates as YouTube, there are other services that provide similar functionality where you can share your videos publicly.
In this area we've included several alternatives because each provides something a bit different:
- LBRY - a peer-to-peer video sharing service
- Bitchute - a non-censored sharing area
- Vimeo - best if you want to share content directly (and privately) [i.e. a video repository for clients, etc.]
- Rumble - newest option created initially for politically conservative content
NEW Stripe Alternative
We just found out that the Stripe payment processing service has begun limiting who it will do business with based upon their 'viewpoints'. This has resulted in some large organizations loosing the ability to collect donations and process sales transactions. Because of this we are in the process of looking for alternatives for our clients that will provide them with unfiltered eCommerce processing functions.
- Watch for updates here in the future.
What to do?
We encourage you to start looking into some of these alternatives as there is a chance that your content may get filtered either because the main service providers don't like your content or just because they actively try to determine what viewers should see. And because most of these services function on filtering 'rules', those rules could effect your content even if you are a very small organization.
You can use the information provided here to start your search, or we can work with you to determine the best way to ensure your content and communication reaches your intended audience.
We can connect with you and help put together a plan to optimize where your content is distributed to reach your audience consistently.
The alternatives that we list here are not the only ones, but they are ones that we feel are stable and provide at least somewhat comparable functionality to the service they 'replace'. If you have suggestions of other alternatives please use the Contact US form to share your insights.