she / they / most neopronouns
Avatar is a bobtail squid photo from Rickard Zerpe (CC-BY 2.0)
wiki-user: underscores
Pixelfed has more than 100,000 active users, about 5 times what it was 6 months ago, so I wouldn’t really call it dead. And with the fediverse, pixelfed and mastodon can talk to each other, so even on less active platforms you can connect with millions of other people. Most of the accounts I follow on pixelfed are from mastodon.
It reminded me of Iji.
Sorted them into a few categories
Social
Cheogram - xmpp chat, can also handle phone and sms gateways
Fedilab - my preferred fediverse app for mastodon
Jerboa - preferred lemmy app
K-9 Mail - email
Pixelix - pixelfed app. not sure if I like this or PixelDroid better yet
Media
AntennaPod - podcasts
Kiwix - offline copies of useful wikis, q&as, archives, etc.
Librera FD - books
NewPipe - watch youtube videos, although google keeps trying to break it
Voice - audiobooks
Security
Aegis - two factor authentication
KeePassDX - password management
WG Tunnel - VPN connection, still not sure if this is the best option
Notes and Documents
Orgzly Revised - note taking. for people not familiar with emacs something like logseq or safe notes might be better
Pinkt - bookmarks
Syncthing-Fork - synchronize files between devices
System
F-Droid - technically it can install itself
Lawnchair - alternative home screen / app launcher
ntfy - runs in the background, handles push notifications for some other apps
Unexpected Keyboard - has the fancy keys that most android keyboards leave out
Other Tools
Fennec - basically firefox
Organic Maps - sometimes missing info and it doesn’t have traffic data. simpler than OsmAnd
PocketPaint - make art on your phone
QuickDict - offline multi-language dictionary
I’ve got hundreds more installed, but those are some of my favorites.
There’s nothing quite perfect, so I still use ddg the most often. They do pull in most of their results from bing, but they also have their own crawler and use a bunch of other search engines as sources. At least they only send the search query to microsoft, so it’s better for privacy than searching directly on google or bing.
SearXNG is an open source meta search engine that compiles results from other search engines.
Marginalia and Clew are a couple of open source search engines that focus on only indexing smaller, independent, or non-commercial sites.
A lot of sites have their own search engines built in, so I’ll often search directly on sites like Wikipedia or Lemmy.
There’s a good overview of various search engines in this blog post.
@[email protected] made a browser addon for this.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/lemmy-language-memorizer/