Often times, the frontends provided by services are not the best. They are often slow, bloated, and don't respect the user's privacy.

When I discovered alternative frontends, it was a huge realization. I came to realize just how much I was missing out on.

I was amazed at how much faster and more responsive they were. I was also amazed at how they respected the privacy of its users.

For example, youtube is owned by Google, a company with a terrible privacy reputation. They have been caught spying on users, and selling user data to advertisers.

While many people think not logging into Youtube and using a tracker blocker is enough to stop Google from tracking them, it's not.

Web fingerprinting tactics nowdays are so effective that you can identify a user with very high accuracy even with aggressive blocking.

This is why I always use alternative frontends for services that have them. They are often open source and auditable to see exactly what it does.

An added benefit of alternative frontends is that they can be hosted on your own server. Meaning you can have full control over your data, and everything else.

This is a starting point of a decentralized web, where there is more than one organization or individual that hosts a particular service.

I loved these frontends so much that I decided to join an organization to help host them and make them available to as much people as possible.

That organization was Project Segfault. Nowdays, it hosts a variety of alternative frontends for services like Youtube, Reddit, and Twitter.

Finally, this post will be concluded with a mega list of alternative frontends. https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends

I hope you enjoyed this post. If you did, please consider sharing it with your friends. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me.