intro⌗

First, let’s start with what is a community service? Well, think of community services as broad services for mass public consumption. These services could offer one or two technical advantage over their cooperate counter-parts.

Email is a good example of when a community service can thrive. Many cooperate email-providers have sluggish UIs that work on the latest and greatest. To access your email from let’s say a third party client is sometimes do-able but annoying to flat-out impossible.

The advantage of these community services is that they are built for human interaction. They don’t seek money from you or anybody else and instead they focus on the usability part of things.

Another good example is the service Nitter. Nitter is an alternative front-end to Twitter, with a focus on clarity and simplicity. Nitter doesn’t have any ads, is up to 3 times or more lighter than Twitter(in terms of data usage) and doesn’t require you to sign in to use the service.

In this article, I plan to cover a variety of community services, why I think they’re key to better internet usage and lastly what I plan to run in-order to give back to the community.

the varied selection⌗

For community services, I think the strongest contenders are the services that everybody depends on. For example, social media services, be it a full alternative or a wrapper for the cooperate service.

Alternative front ends are usually well made, try using an invidious(YouTube front-end) or nitter(Twitter front-end) and notice how much usable it is compared to the real implementation of the service. These frontends usually feel light, practical and pleasantly private.

Besides social media, there are cloud services like NextCloud that provide a similar experience to Google Drive or Dropbox. Though, I personally don’t use Cloud file-solutions(I find them too restricting for automatic backups), I could see people use these services to back up their photos or music.

Another good example of a community service, that I haven’t found an actual implementation for, is a financial service that you attach to your credit card, bitcoin wallet or any other payment system, to help sort out your expenses.

A company could very well do a good job of implementing this idea but a community service that offers implements it has several advantages:

  1. The development of the app would focus more on providing value to the people rather than create superfluous features that are only meant to drive up profits
  2. Community members could offer advice to other members about finance, thereby improving the community’s financial habits.
  3. Real help could be provided to those in need of financial assistance in the case of a financial meltdown, similiar to GoFundMe but with a real purpose in-sight because of the strong connection between the community members

For your security and privacy, what’s better than a community-funded VPN service that uses pseudonymous credentials, not linking anything to you, your email or phone number. Or a URL shortener that doesn’t wait 5 seconds to redirect you to the page that you want.

How about a chatting server that implements one of the many protocols meant exactly for internet messaging with no agenda in-sight. No data tracking, no privacy issues, just a good service.

more on chatting services⌗

I don’t wanna seem to pessimistic but is this the best we can do in terms of human text conversation solutions? Segmented chatting services that implement the same features but use a different protocol, making chatting more complex than it has to be.

We have: Facebook’s Messenger, Apple’s iMessage, Facebook’s Whatsapp, Google Chat, Google Meet, Google Duo, Google Talk, Microsoft Kaizala, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Slack, WeChat, Viber, Signal, Telegram and many others on the list.

Imagine if things were simpler: There was a standard chatting protocol, most companies adhered to that protocol(similar to E-Mail) and you have only account to manage. Instead of texting your family over WhatsApp, and talking to your co-workers in Slack, you just use one account™ and voila, you can chat with anybody in the world.

distraction and internet⌗

The internet is full of hungry companies that are competing for your attention to sell you their product. This is natural and quite human but we’ve essentially increased the amount of distraction because there is so much competition on attention.

Attention has become a commodity in the 21st century and rarely is it uesd for good. Most of the time, these companies have nothing to offer to improve your life but offer you a silly product. Because of constant advertisements, we’ve become quite distracted.

Community services can serve as an antidote to that because they focus on providing good services first rather on profits. Community services trade dodgy advertisements for down to earth advertisements that cut to the chase and provide real value to people. Note that this isn’t a fixed rule but rather a guideline of behaivor, and of course there are exceptions where the opposite is true, communities that prefer dodgy advertisements to down to earth advertisements.

my plan to give back⌗

I’d like to provide services that could function as a backup to other services like a nitter instance, or an invidious instance and so on. I believe in these services and their ability to improve human lives through offering better user experience.

Though, this isn’t a fixed list, I’d like to provide the following:

  • Nitter instance
  • Invidious instance
  • A search engine wrapper like searx
  • And a free blog platform

My contribution to the internet would have to be through offering these services to random people like me who use them regularly because they are benefitial.