UPDATE: I've added advanced search filters directly on the listing, so you can now filter self-hosted tools by their alternative, category, tech stack used and licence they're released on 🔥
this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2025
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Love the list, but scrolling through, the one liners don't mean much for a lot of these.
The descriptions are just too short and vague to even understand what a lot of them actually do.
Noted! I have longer descriptions in the db, but didn't want to bloat the listings. Will try with a longer description soon.
It's a tough balance, you don't want a whole page for each one. Maybe if there was a clear list of tags so it's easier to understand even what category they're talking about?
For example:
Penpot
Design freedom meets open-source collaboration
I really don't know what this product category even is. Is it for web layout? Is it a drawing program? Is it for CAD?
Fair point. I'll try to add more context to the listings. Thanks!
personally I love it when websites solve this problem with hover hints, theres something satisfying about seeing a paragraph of text on hover that just answers all my questions. not sure how that'd work for people viewing on mobile though
No please, hover links are just useless to tablet and mobile users, anybody without a mouse actually!
Added just that! Thank you for the suggestion.
anytime! just remember as @[email protected] pointed out, these will be useless for tablet and mobile users, so you may still need an additional solution!
Maybe consider collapsible dropdowns or similar for the extra information
This is the solution. That way i can decide if i want to read more about one of them and then sinply open the dropdown.
Added longer description and major alternative when you hover over the cards. Hope that'll make it easier to browse.
Yeah, that looks amazing, and it's really quick. That's a huge improvement!
Thank you.
I don't see any Fediverse platforms on there, how would you feel about adding them? Seems like they'd fit.
https://openalternative.co/categories/social-media
Could add Lemmy, Mastodon, MBin, PieFed, PixelFed, Loops, PeerTube, NodeBB...
Maybe you wanna collaborate with selfh.st to complete each others list?
Edit: Looked at the list. Good job on the design and content. Bookmarked it :)
One thing I would like to see is a way to distinguish which apps do Real™ Open Source vs fakie open source. For example, I see Joplin on there saying "Your secure, open-source note-taking companion". I guess that's technically true at this point in time, but they also force contributors to sign a CLA so they have the option to pull the rug later on. (Something which does happen.)
They even say so explicitly:
This is necessary so that if we ever want to change the license again we are able to do so
— https://joplinapp.org/news/20221221-agpl/#what-does-it-change-for-developers
And fine, if they want to do that it's up to them. I'd just like a quick way to tell the difference between open source 😒 and Open Source 😄.
The Free Software Foundation requires "CLAs" as well. I have no fear that they're going to rug-pull. I don't think we can use that as the indicator. IMO, it's even a good idea to have a CLA so that's no conflict that the project owns the code.
The warning for me is if the project is run by a company, especially a VC-backed company. Joplin isn't, so I would be comfortable using it (although I don't).
Interesting! I didn't realize this! https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.en.html
only the copyright holder or someone having assignment of the copyright can enforce the license. If there are multiple authors of a copyrighted work, successful enforcement depends on having the cooperation of all authors.
So it seems like the FSF does this in order to be able to enforce GPL. Buuut, these guys really gotta be the exception. I feel like the probability of the FSF selling out and going full corporate evil is pretty low...
a good idea to have a CLA so that’s no conflict that the project owns the code.
That's exactly the problem though. The project owning the code, instead of the contributors owning the code.
How would you determine if a thing is true open source, or capitalism masquerading as open source like you've described, if you were to just stumble onto a software randomly and wanted to check?
For the specific case I'm talking about (CLAs), I check if the project (on GitHub or wherever) requires signing a CLA to contribute. In Joplin's case, they do:
- https://joplinapp.org/news/20221221-agpl/#what-does-it-change-for-developers
- https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/blob/dev/readme/dev/index.md#signing-the-individual-contributor-license-agreement
Basically, with a CLA they can change the license at any time to whatever they want. If they want to go closed source tomorrow they can with zero trouble. Without a CLA, they would need approval from everyone who has contributed to the project to do a license change, giving the project proper open source protections.
This needs to be made more visible on github, like a little tag near all the share data under about. But I guess the only way that would work was people self reporting their CLA's. And not sure how keen microsoft would be on a consumer protection change
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In addition to other suggestions, the cards need to show what they're alternative to without clicking.
Never heard of 99% in that list.
Also, Gitea should not be there. It is a corporate -owned open core project that was hostilely taken away from the community.
Didn't know that. Do you have more info/source?
Forgejo is the fork that sprung from this whole debacle. https://forgejo.org/2022-12-15-hello-forgejo/
This is neat! Bookmarking this. Not sure what you’re using on the backend, but are you open to contributions for more detailed descriptions?
I use NextJS for both front and backend. I'm open for any contributions if you're interested.
Your self hosted page should have the categories listed too.
Done 👍
Great stuff.
Wow, that's a really complete list. Thanks for sharing! I might check out Dokploy some time, it sounds interesting.
You should check it for sure! I actually use it to deploy some of the services I need for running OpenAlternative.
It's really surprising how fast people forget about the shady shit rustdesk has done.
Near as I understand it: years ago some dumb engineering decisions were made, acknowledged, and corrected. Is there some recent scandal I'm out of the loop on?
What self-hosted alternative would you recommend for document collaboration? Word processing docs, spreadsheets, pdf’s, etc.
I was using Nextcloud, but it’s not been as straightforward for file-sharing as I’d like, multiple people can’t work on a document at once, and it doesn’t save changes consistently (especially with fillable PDF’s).
Onlyoffice + Nextcloud. Is a little complex to self host the Onlyoffice Document server (the backbone of Onlyoffice collaboration), but it works very nice for multi user document collaboration, it even works on federated instances when using same document server.
Thanks! I’ll give it a whirl.
I'm tired of Cloudflare ... 😔
Yeah I havent been able to load the cf verification on my android for like over a week now lol
I wish more software wasn’t “hosted” these days.
I miss app ass apps.
Don’t mind me. I’m just feeling old.
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Appreciate the effort, but without categories it's not going to sail too far.
Right now it's just a long list of everything that it's out there, awesome-selfhosted is much more usable for looking up what you need.
Also, did you join any kind of affiliate programs/partnerships for these "10% off" green boxes? If so, would be great to disclose it. Nothing bad with getting some cash, but community will just appreciate the honesty.
There are some affiliate links on the website, but the discounted products are not affiliated. I just reached out to the owners asking for an exclusive discount for paid plans.
There are categories on the website, but not directly on the list. But here is "full-text" search, so you could technically search by category or an alternative. Try "analytics" or "google analytics" for example.
Thank you all for the comments and the feedback! I've implemented most of the things reported. You can now filter the self-hosted tools by category directly in the filters. Tool cards should now show more info about the product on hover (longer description and the most popular alternative).
If you see anything else to improve, let me know.
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