Tsaine
varishangout.com
Google Play Books
I’m not sure if Calibre works as a replacement, as it’s software to organise and view, there isn’t a store or built-in library access, as far as I remember. (Feel free to correct me on this.)
For books there are plenty of open libraries. Some general purpose would be
- Archive.org;
- Z-library (mirror1, mirror2, mirror3, tor-mirror1, tor-mirror-2);
- Library Genesis (main mirror, also try .lc, .lib, .gs, .io and the onion address);
- Project Gutenberg provides a large body of texts, though often only as texts or poorly compiled ebooks;
- Library of Congress
Now some specialised libraries:
- Sci-Hub (mirror1, mirror2) – a storage for scientific papers, so it’s mostly for those who seek a particular work by its DOI;
- Scientific library of Cornell University – same as above;
- The internet Classics Archive – if you’re into Plutarch, Plautus or Confucius. Nothing new, the editions are the same as on Archive.org, but this library may have texts from books not yet scanned. Plenty of worthy translations, though one should keep in mind, that despite the perfect or nearly perfect translation was possible a hundred years ago, it wasn’t always the case.
- Perseus digital library – another classics archive;
- Petrucci Music Library is for musicians, it’s a library of scores;
- e-Museum: a large collection of Japanese art, calligraphy and scrolls, all digitised at high resolution;
- Vatican library – primarily interesting for its incunabulas and centuries-old documents;
- Metropolitain museum of art publications– for those interested in art.
Mentioning Mastodon here is a questionable choice. Its creator is known to have ties with European government project known as Eunomia. Working as a consultant he was on their payroll. Eunomia was supposed to be the EU government’s attempt at decentralised networks. The project was closed because either the govt thought it’s a waste of money or because they just feared, that there will be a massive exodus from Twitter, and when only a small one happened, they’ve realised there won’t be people coming to their alternative. Still, if they’d want a backdoor in fedi software, Mastodon would be the candidate number one.Social media
”Ten friends” is a suspicious project. For something made just by “one of the ten” it has too good of a promo site. They don’t suggest a way of communication, however, they seem to seek binding people to a hosting provider instead. So it’s basically an ad of a hosting provider, it’s a bulb of a deep sea fish. Some ISP probably heard of this thing called “fediverse” and decided to make some quick money while the iron’s hot. Like “look how we’re good and oriented on giving people resources for their own fedi place” – while what they offer is virtually as anywhere else, just with a “SPECIAL!!” label. The expressive colours on the promo site are chosen to push you to them. For someone who can see marketing tricks, it consists on 100% of those. Ordinary programmers and sysadmins, who – as the website claims – are behind this, usually don’t know shit at design and promoting stuff. This makes it suspicious.
Ungoogled Chromium is still chromium. And chromium is still chrome. Because the play store is still there. Google has you by the balls, unless you disable it and install extensions by grabbing extensions from the creator’s website and placing them manually into your config folder.Browser
Brave is made to breed normalfags who watch ads and yeet at Brave’s cryptotoken. They’re all tagged and identified. It’s very questionable what this piece of crap even doing in this list.
How there’s no XMPP + encryption layer?Messaging and Videochat
There’s Oxford dictionary, which works online with little javascript. I’d recommend also the Cambridge one, but that one is bugged beyond repair without JS (and with it too). Also paper dictionaries as PDF.Dictionaries