Disclaimer: I know that being a developer is hard, I’m not trying to say that people should start doing these ideas to please my desires. I just thought it was fun to have a list of ideas that could improve the libre software community and these are some of them that I would really love to see. If you have some other Ideas contribute as well, and if you are a developer and you are looking for something to do but don’t know what, you may gain some inspiration from here.

Projects that do not exist:

  • Libre and privacy respecting alternative to DeepL. Details: I know there are already some libre translators, but I will not stop using DeepL until there’s something as good as it.

  • Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Genius. Details: It’s a website where users create community based lyrics for their favourite artists and can create annotations and add metadata.

  • Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Goodreads. Details: It’s a website where you keep a log of what you’ve read, what you want to read and what you are reading, you can also rate books. Here is an alternative.

  • Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Grammarly. Details: It’s a set of applications or add-ons that help you with typos and it will improve your text.

  • Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Letterboxd. Details: t’s a website where you keep a log of what you’ve seen and what you want to see, you can also rate movies and TV shows.

  • Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Pixabay. Details: It’s a website where you can get images to use without copyright restrictions. I know CC has a website for this but their content is really poor.

  • Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Push notifications. Here is an alternative.

  • Libre and privacy respecting alternative to ReCaptcha.

  • Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Shazam. Details: It’s an application that tells you what you are listening if you let it listen to it

  • Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Unsplash. Details: It’s a website where you can upload and use photos of people that are licensed under a license that allows for use under most circumstances for free.

  • Libre and privacy respecting mouse gesture and radial menu to an operative system level. *Similar to Gesturefy and CompassMenu but in a way that it can work in any application. Look this video for more details since this is probably a really deep and hard to explain topic. Here is an alternative for the radial menu.

  • Libre and privacy respecting website where to upload and download 3D models licensed under a CC.

  • Libre and privacy respecting website where to play a lot of different card games. Details: Similar to Lichess. I am satisfied if you only can play poker until it gains some traction.

  • Fully libre and privacy respecting alternative to Xayn. Details: It’s an application that recommends you articles based on the input you give to the algorithm. Some of its code it’s liberated on GitHub, but not all of it.

  • Libre , decentralized and privacy respecting alternative to Imgur. Details: It would be great if this could work along the fediverse, for example people would host images there instead of here on Lemmy or Mastodon, making these platforms much more lightweight.

  • Libre, privacy respecting and not self hostable visual bookmark manager. *Details: There are a few alternatives here and there, maybe, but they are really awful looking and generally you need to self host. I don’t know how to self host and it would probably make my machine slower, I would prefer something that someone’s alreay hosting. This is exactly like what I’m looking for, but they haven’t launched it yet since they don have enough resources, it could die, too, maybe.


Projects that exist but have some issues:

  • A set of common android apps. Details: I know there are a are a lot of basic Android applications to replace the default ones that come with your phone but I feel someone should create a set that align the aesthetics of them to be coherent with each other. I know Tibor Kaputa does this, but in my opinion I would like something that looks a bit more modern and that has more features, since theirs are based around minimalism. For example, the camera application does not have as many options as my default one, etc.

  • Libre, privacy respecting, aesthetic and functional map application. Details: I haven’t been able to find a working application to see maps, I generally end up using DDG’s in browser map because of this. The only one that worked was one calle Maps which was a fork of a really good one (but it was filled with proprietary and other shady stuff ) but it stopped working after some time. I mention the aesthetic parts because I want to be able to recommend this to people who wouldn’t use it otherwise if it looks like something really “primitive”.

  • Revive waifu2x as a serious project. Details: I really love this website, but I really hate the whole idea of the waifu thing, it is misogynous and I feel like unprofessional.

  • Libre, privacy respecting and highly customizable home launcher. Details: I know there are a ton of home launchers for Android, but most of them focus on minimalism or simplicity, I don’t want that, I want a super customizable full of features application that can let me do almost anything. The closest to this was Lawnchair which is dead, luckily Omega launcher exists now and it looks like it’ll be able to achieve this, but it’s not there yet.

  • Revive AquaDroid Details: It is a really beautiful application but it has some bugs, not so many features and development has halted.

  • Micalet@lemmy.ml
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    4 years ago

    Grammarly FOSS alternative: https://languagetool.org/ Multilanguage (It recognizes which one are you using, that is very useful for me as I use 3 - Catalan, Castilian, and English -) and it is sponsored by the European Union

    • Jomn@lemmy.ml
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      4 years ago

      For French, Grammalecte is also nice. What I like about it is that I can very easily make it work with Emacs and AucTeX.

    • ghost_laptop@lemmy.mlOP
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      4 years ago

      Yes, someone already recommended it to me and I’m using it, I love it! I’m going to edit the post when I have some time.

  • ufra@lemmy.ml
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    4 years ago

    These type of lists are good for deveopers who are looking for new ideas. This would be a good community/sub in its own right.

  • xarvos@lemmy.ml
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    4 years ago

    For grammarly there is LanguageTool. There are browser add-ons, libreoffice plugin, and command line tool for checking plain text

  • testman@lemmy.ml
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    4 years ago

    It would be great if there was a website where people could propose ideas like this, and also vote on the proposed ideas. That way we would have a good community-wide overview of which projects do most people want to see happen. Instead of getting an “I wish this kind of project would exist” post every now and then on some random part of the internet.

  • sweedheart@lemmy.ml
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    4 years ago

    Regarding the map application: osmand for Android, don’t know if there exist ports to other platforms. As you can download from fdroid, it should meet most oft your criteria. You can directly contribute to open Street maps and do some nice bike navigation as well. And it’s very aesthetical, I think;-)

    • ghost_laptop@lemmy.mlOP
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      4 years ago

      I found one called OsmAnd+, I’m guessing it’s the same one. Yep, this is really what I’ve been looking for, it looks great and it works flawlessly, too. It has so many features I think it’ll take me some time to learn how to use it. Thanks a lot!

      • Kohen Shaw@lemmy.ml
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        4 years ago

        And to contribute to osmand+, there is the app Street Complete on fdroid. You can use it to add / correct locations and streets. It looks awesome and contributing feels like a video game. It’s honestly amazing.

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          4 years ago

          I think you can contribute directly through OsmAnd+ if I’m not wrong, at least there’s an option that lets you sign in and add data I think, I don’t have my phone right now so I can’t verify that.

    • Metawish@lemmy.ml
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      When I tried to use it, it doesn’t recognize mailing address as a valid input? It also almost took me to a completely different location when I tried to find something I’ve never been to before (I just had the places name, no address). I still contribute to Open Street, but I still don’t use it for travel directions or location identification :/

  • poVoq@lemmy.ml
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    4 years ago

    I feel a bit like no matter what alternatives we will propose you will say that doesn’t count because is isn’t as good or as popular as the one you mentioned. At least that is what your text sounds like.

    But anyways there are already many FOSS solutions for the issues you have. Here are some examples quickly off my head, but I would say 80% of the above exists more or less.

    https://bookwyrm.social/

    https://gotify.net/

    https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/09/fly-pie-gnome-extension

    • ghost_laptop@lemmy.mlOP
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      4 years ago

      Well, I didn’t try to sound like that, I’m sure maybe a lot of what I said doesn’t exists maybe exists, I tried looking for a lot of them but didn’t find alternatives, maybe I didn’t search hard enough.

      Thanks a lot for your suggestions, they all look exactly like what I was looking for, I’m really excited about Bookwyrm and Fly Pie specially!

    • ghost_laptop@lemmy.mlOP
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      4 years ago

      Ohh, that sucks, it looked like a really awesome project. Still someone else mentioned Gotify, I haven’t had the time to look into it yet but maybe that can already achieve the same?

      • poVoq@lemmy.ml
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        4 years ago

        Gotify works fine, however of course it isn’t that well integrated into the OS.

        The problem with alternative push notifications basically boils down to the fact that the very purpose of push notifications systems in Android/iOS is to have only one long-running process with network access and hibernate all the other programs. This is one of the main reasons these systems appear to have better battery life than alternatives.

  • geopoliticssuck@lemmy.ml
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    4 years ago

    For Imgur, there’s Pixelfed (for a traditional image-hosting website) or IPFS (where you can host/pin any file).

    • ghost_laptop@lemmy.mlOP
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      My idea isn’t like a social platform but rather a hosting website which focuses on those images being displayed somewhere else, but maybe Pixelfed can be used in the same way? I have heard about IPFS but I haven’t really looked into it, I know it has a lot of different features and possibilities which seems interesting and promising.

      • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
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        4 years ago

        Image hosting badly needs a decentralized hosted option, ideally one based on torrents or IPFS, because the situation right now is horrible. The exact same image gets shared to twitter, reddit, imgur, FB, and a ton of other platforms, each having to host their own copy while sharing none of the bandwidth to serve them.

          • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
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            4 years ago

            It would be really nice to have a peertube type torrent solution for images, but it’d be nice if it weren’t reliant solely on webtorrents, but on ordinary torrents too.

        • ghost_laptop@lemmy.mlOP
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          4 years ago

          Well, actuall I thought of this because of some other comment you made when someone told you that Lemmy should host other files besides images and you told them you didn’t even want to host images. So yeah, I agree with you, it will be a lot better for the environment, also.

      • geopoliticssuck@lemmy.ml
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        4 years ago

        Then it’s IPFS, which is distributed, not federated. You can upload a file to service that can pin the files for free (like globalupload.io up to a certain file size) or pin the files yourself. Then other users running IPFS on their machines can pin those files. The network runs a bit like BitTorrent.

    • Avery@lemmy.ml
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      On iOS, this is a non-starter. The system suspends your app after a certain amount of time in the background, and closes any web socket connections whether you like it or not.

      You might be able to make it work on Android (I have a lot less experience working with Android than iOS), but the trade-off is that if every one of your apps is holding open a network connection for its own push notifications, that would impact your battery life. Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) from Google, and Apple Push Notification Service (APNS) both work by funneling all notifications through a single network connection to the user’s device.

      And for what it’s worth, FCM just proxies messages to APNS when the client is an iOS device. Not even Google can create a true alternative for push notifications on iOS.

    • ghost_laptop@lemmy.mlOP
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      I am not really sure, I know that most of the applications rely on Google’s servers for them to work and the only alternative that I know of is MicroG but it’s more like a front-end or something like that which still uses Google’s servers, I think a whole thing would be better.

      • AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.ml
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        4 years ago

        Can’t apps just connect a web socket to whatever service it’s using and receive notifications that way? Hell, or just ping the server every few minutes.

        • ghost_laptop@lemmy.mlOP
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          As I said I don’t know for real since my knowledge is very basic, but Session for example has the option of running always in the background being connected all the time to the servers or relying of push notifications which make it easier and less battery consuming, but it would be great to hear what someone more tech-savvy has to say.