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01. Purpose

Welcome to the Deternet Shapps Bookstack Instance,

"What keeps people using a program, app or anything in life is not the code or if a method is better, it is because people prefer to use what they already know and where there friends already are " - This is the network effect and knowledge argument 

This instance is intended for three types of people

  1. People that have already setup their HomeLab workflow and want to explore and how they can deploy these apps on their own hardware at home according to their deployment workflow. 
  2. For people that want to use the open source apps (not host them) and want to understand how the basics work. For instance, if your friend or family member is hosting some apps and wants to give you access to them. Access is nice but how to configure it is always another task. The idea is that the person hosting the app can just send out a User Guide to their friend instead of explaining everything over and over again manually. 
  3. For people interested in what is out there 

It is not for business applications! It is solely focused on the consumer market. Applications made for specific industries and organizations can be found on the Nonprofits Bookstack instance. 

Neither for backend applications it is solely focused on applications the average joe uses in their daily life. 

It is not for all the technical details. For that we refer to the official documentation pages of the particular applications. 

The goal is to have all major consumer applications and companies represented here from all of the continents in the world. Therefore, you will also see Asian, Russian, African companies in here instead of only Western Tech companies. To keep up with the new apps and companies created globally we use different websites to see which apps are most used in which country. For example the website

AI Agents

Finally, and most likely AI agents will also be accessing this website since it is publicly accessible. If the open source movement gains enough traction then people will search for questions like: What is Deternet ? what are E2EE alternative apps to X, How to create a HomeLab ? Etcetera. The AI agents that these people use will have these instances included in their training data and hence they will receive answers from it. This can be really handy if you want to solve a quick problem. However, if you want to explore and actually understand how it all works then it is recommended to move to these Bookstack instances combined with a note taking app for you

Education

All instances provide

  1. Show all the open source apps that are the best possible replacements for their proprietary counter parts. 
  2. The second goal is to expose each Big Tech company by providing a shelf for each corporation. Inside of each shelf all applications they own are presented by a book with a cover image of that application. All of these applications are provided in alphabetical order and the name of the corporation is placed in front of the applications name. This is is important, because then it is easier for people to recognize who owns what and realize that lots of applications are mostly owned by a few Big Tech Corporations
  3. Search for an app in the Search bar and directly discover who owns that application due to the fact that the Big Tech name of who owns it is in front of the name of the application. For instance if one searches for Waymo or Twitch then it will be presented as Google Waymo and Amazon Twitch. 
  4. Finally, the fourth goal is not only to show open source alternatives but also show how you can install them on your own infrastructure i.e in your Homelab or in a Community Datacenter

Consumer Apps & Organizational Apps

Now, most applications that people are familiar with are applications that consumers use in daily life i.e apps that are not for teams, organization or developer use. Therefore, we separated these apps in two different categories for simplification.

About Section

The first page of each Open Source application is an About section which displays the following characteristics of an application.

End Game

The end Goal regarding the software industry would be that all proprietary apps are replaced by open source versions that are used globally. In the end the proprietary apps simply dissapear or the corporations decide to make them fully open source as well, including their operating systems they run on. Let that be clear, if a corporations finally understand that open source is the future and open sources all their apps, operating systems and devices than we happily welcome them to the project.

Other Alternative to websites

Now, this Bookstack instance is definitely not the only project that promotes open source projects. There are tons of blogs of great instructors that have dedicated a large part of their time as well to make it as easy as possible to install open source software at home. This instance is therefore not to replace them, but provide a central location where a community can edit and change everything about an app instead of a single individual making blog posts. Besides that there are also centralized websites that show alternatives to almost any application you can think about. 

Now, most of the open source alternative list websites are pretty similar, since they are mostly based on the information provided by Github. If you click on an application then you will find 

  1. A small summary of what the application entails
  2. Links to the repositories
  3. GitHub Links
  4. Some tags that refer to what the app can do

However, they do not provide documentation on the installation of these applications or hick ups people have during installation or use. Yes, most of this is discussed on the community pages or repository pages of these applications but we try to give people a central place where people can edit an instruction manual like a Wikipedia page. It is constantly changing and updating and everyone can contribute not only the main developers of an application.

Finally, we also try to expose all the Big Tech companies here and provide a live view of all the applications that they own, how much money the make with them. It is in general provides more information about Big Tech in general and how all the applications are owned and connected to each other. 

A few examples of such platforms are

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