Search Engines

Anonymous authoritative metasearch engine LibreX

Search engines controlled by the authorities Google, Microsoft, and others give you the results based on their algorithms which are a black box and unavailable to us. They also tailor results based on what they know about you. They serve advertisements in these results. These problems can be mitigated.

Librex is a metasearch engine. It anonymously sends your query to many different search engines such as Google at the same time. It will also redirect links you click to private front ends of commonly used platforms such as Youtube. You can also find torrents for movies, books, music, etc. Just be sure you have a VPN running if you download torrents to avoid getting scary letters from your ISP. Features are explained more here.

With a metasearch engine, you can only get the results that the search engine providers have authorized and not censored. A new generation of search engines not controlled by governments is Yacy.net.

Other search engines I recommend not hosted by me

https://search.brave.com is built into Brave browser and is getting good.

https://yandex.com is not based in NATO states and gives results often not indexed by NATO based engines. 

https://searx.space/ shows other metasearch engine instances that use different engines.

For spreadsheets, rich text documents, presentations and other types of files on which you want to collaborate with others, check out Cryptpad at https://office.ravergram.club/.

The spreadsheets in Cryptpad do not render well on some mobile devices. If you or others with whom you will collaborate expect to use a mobile device, I setup Ethercalc at https://pad.ravergram.club/ for you to use.

This is a private alternative to Google docs and Office 365. It is end to end encrypted which means that I cannot see anything nor even change your password. So use a password manager and don't lose your password!

If you create an account, you will see that you only have a small amount of space in the drive. If you want more space, just click your profile icon in the upper right hand corner of the screen and click [Support] to tell me how much space you want.

Overview

We currently have three social media instances that are different. This document explains them and some general tips.

Mastodon/Raverdon and Peopleverse

For over a year I have been running a Mastodon SW instance at https://friends.ravergram.club. I setup a nicer instance using Firefish SW found at https://peoplever.se, but it is no longer maintained. I have informed people to migrate off of it.

The instances I run and most of the fediverse is free of advertising, AI(Artificial Intelligence algorithms that manipulate your feeds), corporate, and government control. It is federated meaning that even though only a few people may be on this server, you can follow and communicate with millions of people on thousands of other servers. Still don't quite understand what and why?

Here is a short video.

Guides from others

These mostly reference Mastodon which is the most widely use fediverse software, but most of it applies to Calckey which is more fully featured.

How to Sign Up

Sign up at https://friends.ravergram.club is only possible with a ravergram.club email address. This means you need a full account to access your Ravergram account at https://ravergram.club/nextcloud/apps/mail/ or client of your choice.

Discovering Who to Follow

When you look at the federated timeline, you see what other people on our instance are following and some instances we are relaying with. The fediverse is very popular with data literate people who understand internet technology. So it may look like a nerd fest. You can change that by sharing what you like and following more diverse people. You can start here with finding people to follow.

If you are part of the #TwitterMigration, https://movetodon.org will help you establish your Twitter connections.

See everybody your follows follow https://followgraph.vercel.app/

See current popular statuses. https://feditrends.com/statuses

Lemmy alternative to Reddit

Mastodon, Firefish, and other fediverse implementations work like Facebook or Twitter where people follow other people/accounts or hashtags. Lemmy works like Reddit where people join communities to discuss and upvote or downvote topics in those communities. 

Reddit has been facing a mass exodus as it prepares to IPO as a profitable company and has clamped down on many of the anonymous and ad free ways to access it. They have also started censoring more.

I have setup an instance at https://lemmy.peoplever.se. I am still tweaking a few things and might have it locked for new signups while doing so. I can open it up for you to create accounts if you ask. 

You will be able to subscribe to and engage in any of the many communities out there. You can also create and manage your own community if you want to start one.

My general tips for using Social Media

Getting Started

The fediverse is growing slowly. Do not expect many of your friends or family to join anytime soon. Many are trapped or heavily invested in corporate and government controlled social media and will never leave. You will find some smart, funny, interesting, and brave people in the fediverse over time. It takes a while to get into it as no algorithms are telling you who to follow.

Some people are hesitant to invest effort building up new social networks. Mastodon and other apps on our server are brilliantly designed for portability. Even though you are creating and using accounts on this instance, you are not bound to it. If this instance or the moderator starts to suck, you can rather easily move to another instance of your own or another community any time you want. You bring all your follows, followers, and other settings when you move with a few steps.

Compartmentalizing Your Facets

I encourage people to compartmentalize their identities and related activities on the internet since you would not want to reveal the same aspects of yourself to your boss, your friends, your family, activists, corporations, and your lovers. Most people already do this on government controlled social media by having a Linkedin account for professional stuff, Facebook for personal, and Twitter for political. Each account can be seen as a facet of yourself that might be narrow but deep. Segmenting your facets makes a better experience for your followers since many people are only interested in one facet of you.

I have an account on https://social.peoplever.se with my first and last name and my pictures that is somewhat personal and tame. I approve who can follow this account. I also have a professional focused account. I share and discuss more political topics with other anonymous accounts. I want people to be able to find me by name, but I don't want spooks and corporations to know everything about me. I tell my friends about my political accounts and leave it to them if they want to follow and engage with me on such topics.

When you post, you can set how public or private you want the post to be. Although this is one of the most private social media services you can use, web crawlers can scrape anything you post publicly. If your account is anonymous, you don't need to worry that what you post publicly will be held against you in the future. If I am going to share pictures of a party I had, I generally post from my personal account to followers only. You can figure out your own strategy.

Simplex.chat

This is a simple and secure decentralized messenger that does not use identities. Instead, you create addresses for different channels which you can dispose of. This video explains it well. It supports calls and has a desktop interface as well.

I have setup a server to further decentralize the network. After you install the app, you can go into settings and add the below servers. You can use the default setup servers, but using these spreads the load and makes the network more resilient.

SMP Server:

smp://nfm-LwDDqi9KDPzebYMbriFXdbE3cHvcfHeEhS-1230=@5.78.46.41:5223


XFTP Server:

xftp://v6P3u9_CPYcgoA79e6tHinywTuzxb6RR6hrSaHrlhzY=@5.78.46.41:5224


Invidious

If you like watching videos with advertising, corporations recording your watching history, and algorithmic censorship and nudging of videos to watch, go to youtube.com.

If you want to watch Youtube anonymously without any advertising, algorithmic censorship, or corp/gov tracking, go to https://invid.peoplever.se.

Unique Features of Invidious

• You can download any videos or music to your device.
• You can manage subscriptions and/or subscribe to channels via RSS.  Your subscriptions and watch history are stored only on this private server rather than with Youtube/Google. As alternative to creating an account, you can add the RSS feed to your RSS reader of choice.
• No algorithmic manipulation of your feeds. Youtube is notorious for censoring and taking down videos the government wants hidden. They do allow some controversial content, but they will algorithmically censor it by making it hard to find in search results and not recommend it in people's feeds. Invidious subscriptions mitigate some of this by allowing a chronological feed.

How to create an account

Although anybody can watch videos here, I don't leave the server open for anybody to create an account. If you want to create an account, instant message me with any method listed on my web page. I will open up the server for registration and tell you to create your account.

I have been having difficulty with upgrading Invidious and have had to delete and reinstall it which wipes out accounts and subscriptions. To protect your subscriptions if I need to do that again, occasionally backup your subscriptions in the settings.

Apps for Invidious

You can find various apps that can connect to this instance https://invid.peoplever.se:

Desktop/laptop

https://freetubeapp.io Enter the instance in the settings.

Browser Plug In

You can automatically redirect any Youtube videos on web pages you open to this invidious instance by installing the browser plug-in called Lib Redirect. Add this instance in settings.

TV

Kodi.tv

https://kodi.wiki/view/Add-on:Invidious Login to your account is not possible, and features are limited. You can search and find media you want.

Roku

The Playlet app is very nice.

Android

https://search.f-droid.org/?q=invidious&lang=en

IOS

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yattee/id1595136629

Other platforms and apps for videos

Peertube

This is decentralized video content SW that anybody can run to host and share videos. I might setup one of these instances, but you can search for videos from all the instances at https://sepiasearch.org/.

Rumble

https://Rumble.com is currently a great alternative to Youtube since they censor very little. This is one of the best places for more political content or anything contentious. 

Odysee, Rokfin, Bitchute also host less censored content.

Watch all the platforms while focused on creators

https://grayjay.app/

This is currently broken.

If you like to use Google translate but don't like ads and don't like Google to know what you are reading, you can use https://ravergram.club/translate/.