It's easier than ever to spin up a server and
do your own computing. Keeping your data on a system you control means you don't need to worry about
services shutting down, nefarious
Terms of Service changes, or who might have access to your information.
You might reasonably decide to stick with hosted software for the convenience it offers — but you should be aware of these
free alternatives to the biggest services:
OwnCloud is a great replacement for
Dropbox,
Google Drive or Microsoft's
OneDrive. It has a slick web interface, desktop sync clients for Linux, Windows and OS X, and mobile clients for Android and iOS.
Google Reader's untimely demise spawned two popular feed aggregators,
Feedly and
Feedbin.
Tiny Tiny RSS is a fantastic alternative. It supports content
filtering, podcast aggregation, plugins, theming, and social media
sharing. It's primarily a web app, but it also has an official Android
client.
This blog runs on Ghost.
Ghost.org offers a hosted version, but you can also download it
here and self-host. Ghost provides a great writing experience — and unlike
Medium,
Svbtle and
Blogger, you have complete control over your data.
GitLab is great for self-hosting both public and private Git
projects. It has a robust permission system, supports merge requests,
works well with continuous integration servers, and includes a
per-project wiki and issue tracker. It's not as social as
GitHub, but it's just as powerful. Tiny Tiny RSS (above) is hosted on GitLab.
RocketChat is a polished, extensible
Slack
alternative. It supports video and audio conferencing (which Slack
lacks), link previews and file sharing, and has native clients for
Windows, OS X, Linux, Android and iOS.
Ampache is a simple web-based audio and video streaming server. Ampache could make a good alternative to
Rdio,
Spotify or
iTunes Music, or you could use ownCloud to synchronise your music between systems.
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