Decentralize!

To decentralize means to shift your reliance from one thing to several. No more depending on conglomerates like Google for everything, but instead fanning out and spending your time (and money) elsewhere. Join me!

Last updated: August 26th, 2025

🌟= services that I use and personally recommend!

Why? Why should I care?

Short answer: corporations love charging money for things that can and should be free. Everything on this carrd is free to use and will save you money in the long run. It's also better for your wallet and your community to shop locally and use your public library. The long answer is a lot more serious.Corporations have shown that they have no backbone. YouTube is monitoring user activity to determine someone's age, storing their ID for who-knows-how-long, and using AI to do it, which has already proven to be unreliable. Google and Youtube are both part of a billion dollar contract with the Israeli military. Amazon infamously doesn't care to observe workers' rights, and has avoided paying taxes for several years. The Spotify CEO is investing in AI military weapons. Adobe deceives their users by overcharging and hiding fees. Meta removed fact-checking and secretly created AI profiles. Not all of these issues are comparable in scale and impact, but each of these decisions highlight how corporations care more for profit and growth than privacy, ethics, or their consumers/users.This carrd is a non-exhaustive list of alternatives to services/websites owned by corporations who do not have consumers' best interests in mind. These alternatives have been recommended to me and I can personally vouch for some, but you should conduct your own research to find what suits you best and what organizations you want to support.The goal of using these alternatives is to reduce traffic as much as possible. Traffic equals time and money. Time and money spent on a site is seen as support. For example, hate-watching a show hosted on Amazon Prime is still watching it, and Amazon is still receiving the money you pay for Prime. It might be unrealistic to some to completely stop using these services, especially if your job or school requires it. However, as many people as possible should consider making these changes to increase the impact of not using them. Making a repeated, consistent effort is better than not trying at all, or trying for a few days and quitting. Some of us (me included) have developed dependencies on using sites like YouTube, Instagram, and Spotify. As much as letting go of that attachment can be painful, your comfort is not more important than trying to stop a corporation's unethical practices.

What do these words mean?

These are common words and phrases that you'll see when you visit these websites and possibly try them out!

  • Open-source: Source code that is publicly available to see. This generally makes it difficult for a developer/company to sneak in something malicious.

  • Encrypted: Encrypted data is data that is converted into code that cannot be accessed by anyone without an encryption key, and is commonly used to protect sensitive information, but can also be used to protect emails and text messages.

  • Bloatware: Software included by a manufacturer that takes up excess storage and RAM, drains battery, and slows your device. Includes manufacturer apps, service provider/carrier apps, and adware.

  • Fork: Code that is a modified version of existing software/code.

Alternatives to Amazon

Physical Books

Audible/Kindle

IMDb

Twitch

Alternatives to Google

To export your data from Google, use Google Takeout.

Google Chrome

  • Firefox (recently rolled out AI and data collection, but these settings can be turned off)🌟

  • Librewolf (privacy-focused fork of Firefox, has uBlock Origin built in)

  • Waterfox (privacy focused fork of Firefox)

  • Search for a Cause (search engine based on Yahoo, benefits a charity of your choosing)🌟

  • Ecosia (browser and search engine)🌟

  • Ocean Hero (search engine)

  • Qwant (search engine)

Youtube

Gmail

Google Drive

Google Workspace

  • Libreoffice (suite including text, spreadsheets, presentations, diagrams, database, formula editor)🌟

  • Cryptpad (suite including text, spreadsheets, presentations, rich text, forms, code, kanban, diagrams, markdown slides)

  • Ellipsus (text)

  • Collabora (suite including text, spreadsheets, presentations, vector graphics)

  • Obsidian (text, personal knowledge base)🌟

Alternatives to Spotify

Online

Offline/Download

Alternatives to Adobe Suite

Bridge

InDesign

Alternatives to Meta

Miscellaneous Alternatives

Other Free Stuff

Changelog/Notes

Alternatives to Discord

Alternatives to YouTube: Disclaimer

The way YouTube works makes finding alternatives to it somewhat difficult. Many alternatives have no ads and allow for downloading for offline viewing, but are still connected to YouTube: these are called front-ends. Front-ends, to YouTube, function similarly to adblockers because they remove ads (and therefore don't let them earn ad revenue) but still provide traffic to the site. To engage in an impactful boycott against YouTube, it's important to decrease traffic as much as possible. Use of front-ends isn't recommended, but works if access to YouTube is absolutely necessary. All this to say, using a front-end is better than doing nothing.