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.

  • Nathan John Cooper@lemmy.ml
    3·
    3 years ago

    Fantastic list! I would love to find an open-source, decentralised alternative to iMDB/Letterboxd for tracking movies. If anyone knows of one, let me know!

  • Micalet@lemmy.ml
    2·
    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
      1·
      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.

  • sweedheart@lemmy.ml
    1·
    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
      1·
      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
        1·
        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.

  • geopoliticssuck@lemmy.ml
    1·
    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
      0·
      4 years ago

      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
        1·
        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.

        • southerntofu@lemmy.ml
          1·
          4 years ago

          Entirely agree. It’s a very political problem. Not sure if it’s an actual conspiracy, but around the same time P2P networks were emerging (Napster/Bittorrent), there was a strong push in the industry for asymmetric DSL (previously everyone had equal upload/download), GSM-based internet (fencing off open wifi by making it illegal in many places), and centralized services.

          Ideally:

          • HTML would natively support alternative URLs for a given piece of content, while keeping traditional href/src for backwards compatibility ; we can already do this with <picture> element, but that doesn’t work with <a> tag for example ; also <picture> is intended for different formats not different protocols, so the browser may end up leaking metadata in unexpected ways
          • browsers would support custom proxies/plugins per type of link (eg magnet: or ipfs:// URIs in <img> tag), because direct integration within the browser is a huge maintenance burden
          • p2p networks like IPFS/DAT/Bittorrent would have a PubSub social replication mechanism, where one person/service may subscribe to content from another person/service and pin it automatically (i’m glad IPFS finally got remote pinning, but there’s no subscription system yet)

          In the video world, there’s Peertube which is an interesting tradeoff:

          • Webtorrent distribution of content with the Peertube server acting as tracker
          • automatic social replication from allowlisted federated instances
          • instance operators can choose not to advertise/serve specific pieces of content they don’t like (moderation)

          What remains to be seen is exactly how to deal with abuse while still providing good censorship-resilience. Still, i believe the same Peertube model could be applied to image hosting.

  • guest@lemmy.ml
    21·
    2 years ago

    Grammica is one of best tool to check your sentence structure and lot of text related tool.

  • icyflea@lemmy.ml
    0·
    4 years ago

    For the Imgur one, you could use the LBRY blockchain, since it supports any file.

    • southerntofu@lemmy.ml
      1·
      4 years ago

      Please don’t. The first can be fixed with p2p technology (as LBRY does), the second cannot ever be fixed by technology, because it’s a socio-political problem. And in any case, a for-profit company like LBRY operating a Proof-Of-Work blockchain is going to fix neither. It’s just another cryptoscam among many others.

      I mean seriously, it’s literally using Bittorrent. That’s perfectly fine, but why add a blockchain on top of a perfectly foolproof technology? Ah yes, $$$$$

  • southerntofu@lemmy.ml
    0·
    4 years ago

    Wow, so after all is said, the list is really long for me. I’ll also try to take from other posts other ideas that interest me and put them here. Turns out it’s too long for Lemmy (lol) so i’ll post as subcomments of this one.

    • southerntofu@lemmy.ml
      1·
      4 years ago

      Games

      I really appreciate emulators, but what i would really like to see is free-software, hackable reimplementations for really cool old-school multiplayer games:

      • Trackmania
      • (see FreeCS) Half-Life engine (CS 1.6, anyone?)
      • Super Mario Kart
      • Super Smash Bros

      Why reimplementations not emulators? Because then you can extend the game and make new games from it! You’re not stuck with a binary ROM dictating all the fun you should have.