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Overview of alternative open source front-ends for popular internet platforms (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, etc.)

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alternative-front-ends

Overview of alternative open source front-ends for popular internet platforms (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, etc.)

Call to Action

  • Do you know any other free/open-source projects that are not included in the overview yet? (front ends, alternatives to websites, apps, etc.)
  • Just create an issue and let me know. I'm always looking for new free/open-source projects to add.

Contents

Overview

YouTube

YouTube Music

  • ytmdesktop: Cross-platform (Windows, Mac, and Linux) desktop app for YouTube Music. Has a (proprietary?) remote control app for Android

  • Beatbump: An alternative frontend for YouTube Music created using Svelte/SvelteKit, powered by Cloudflare Workers

  • AudioTube: Client for YouTube Music. Plasma-mobile project with an interface designed for Linux phones

  • th-ch/youtube-music: YouTube Music desktop app based on Electron bundled with custom plugins (including built-in ad blocker and downloader)

Twitter

  • Nitter: Alternative Twitter front-end - Lightweight, no ads, no tracking, no JavaScript required

  • Shitter: Android, alternative front-end for Twitter, built with Java

  • Harpy: Android, alternative front-end for Twitter, built with Flutter/Dart

  • Twidere X: Android, alternative front-end for Twitter, built mostly with Kotlin, in early stage

  • Tweeterr: A tool to use Twitter from the command line on the fly

  • Tweet-app: Desktop Twitter client only for tweeting. Timeline never shows up

  • Tweepy: Twitter for Python

  • Fritter: A free, open-source Twitter client for Android

Reddit

TikTok

Imgur

  • Rimgo: Self-hosted frontend for Imgur ritten in Go

  • Rimgu: Self-hosted alternative frontend/ proxy for Imgur

  • Imgin: Minimal Imgur front end

  • Omgur: Omgur is a free and open-source alternative Imgur front-end focused on privacy. Inspired by the Invidious, Nitter, and Teddit projects.

    • No JavaScript or ads
    • All requests go through the Omgur backend, client never talks to Imgur
    • Prevents Imgur from tracking your IP or JavaScript fingerprint
    • Lightweight
    • Self-hostable
  • imgrs: Imgrs is a free and open-source alternative Imgur front-end focused on privacy. It's a Rust rewrite of a previous Imgur proxy project, Omgur.

Spotify

  • psst: Fast and multi-platform Spotify client with native GUI

  • Spotiqueue: Minimalistic queue-oriented macOS-native client for Spotify, with Guile Scheme scriptability

  • spot: Gtk/Rust native Spotify client for the GNOME desktop. Only works with premium accounts

  • spotube: A lightweight and free Spotify crossplatform-client which handles playback manually, streams music using Youtube & no Spotify premium account is needed

  • SpotX: Modified Spotify Client for Windows (Windows Only) - Blocking ads and updates for the desktop version of Spotify, disabling podcasts and more

  • kotify: Requires Spotify Account - Multiplatform desktop client for Spotify focused on library organization for power users. Relies on official Spotify client for playback

  • librespot: Requires Spotify Premium Account - librespot is an open source client library for Spotify. It enables applications to use Spotify's service to control and play music via various backends, and to act as a Spotify Connect receiver. It is an alternative to the official and now deprecated closed-source libspotify. Additionally, it will provide extra features which are not available in the official library

  • spotifyd: unix daemon, using librespot.

Apple Music

  • Cider: Cross-platform Apple Music experience based on Electron and Vue.js written from scratch with performance in mind

Bandcamp

  • Tent: A simple alternative front-end for Bandcamp that does not require JavaScript and proxies all requests

Twitch

  • streamlink-twitch-gui: Multi platform Twitch.tv browser for Streamlink

  • Twire: Alternative and open source Twitch client for Android

  • Xtra: Twitch player and browser for Android

  • ElectronPlayer: Electron Based Web Video Services Player. Supports Netflix, Youtube, Twitch, Floatplane, Hulu and more

Discord

  • gtkcord4: A lightweight Discord client written in Golang which uses GTK3 for the user interface
  • openasar: An open-source alternative of Discord desktop's app.asar

Google Search

  • Whoogle Search: A self-hosted, ad-free, privacy-respecting metasearch engine for Google

  • Searx: Searx is a free privacy-respecting internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from more than 70 search services. Users are neither tracked nor profiled. Additionally, searx can be used over Tor for online anonymity

  • SearXNG: SearXNG is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from various search services and databases. Users are neither tracked nor profiled (SearXNG is a fork of searx)

  • LibreX: Privacy respecting free meta search engine (free as in freedom)

    • Small and simple meta search engine, fetches and anonymizes results from Google only, has API support, allows redirects to Invidious/ Bibliogram/ Nitter/ Libreddit

Google Translate

Facebook

  • SlimSocial: Android, alternative front-end for Facebook, built with Java

  • Frost: An extensive and functional third party app for Facebook (Android app)

Facebook Messenger

  • Caprine: Unofficial and privacy-focused Facebook Messenger app with many useful features

Mastodon

  • Sengi: cross-platform multi-account Mastodon & Pleroma desktop client

  • TheDesk: cross-platform Mastodon & Misskey desktop client

  • Tootle: simple GTK-based Linux Mastodon client

  • Tusky: lightweight Android Mastodon client

  • Fedilab: multi-account Android Mastodon client

  • Pinafore: Alternative web client for Mastodon, focused on speed and simplicity Unmaintained

  • Hyperspace: cross-platform Mastodon client for the fediverse written in TypeScript and React In maintenance mode

Medium

IMDb

Quora

Reuters

  • Neuters: An alternative front-end to Reuters.com. It is intented to be lightweight and fast, and was heavily inspired by Nitter

Apple AirPlay

  • RPiPlay: An open-source AirPlay mirroring server for the Raspberry Pi. Supports iOS 9 and up.

  • air-pi-play: Turn a Raspberry Pi into an Airplay server using RPiPlay to enable screen mirroring on tvs, monitors and projectors.

Shazam

  • SongRec: Open-source Shazam client for Linux, written in Rust

Telegram

  • Telegram-FOSS: Unofficial, FOSS-friendly fork of the original Telegram client for Android

Hacker News

Other services

  • Pastewin: Free alternative Pastebin front-end

  • MediathekViewWeb: Video content of German public-service television broadcasters (e.g. ARD, ZDF)

  • NoPaste: NoPaste is an open-source website similar to Pastebin where you can store any piece of code, and generate links for easy sharing

  • PrivateBin: Zero knowledge encrypted paste-bin. A minimalist, open source online pastebin where the server has zero knowledge of pasted data. Data is encrypted/decrypted in the browser using 256 bits AES

  • vaultwarden: Password manager. Unofficial Bitwarden compatible server written in Rust, formerly known as bitwarden_rs

  • snapdrop: Similar to Apple's Airdrop but in your browser. A Progressive Web App for local file sharing

  • hedgedoc: Collaborative markdown editor. A platform to write and share markdown

  • etherpad-lite: Collaborative rich text editor. A modern really-real-time collaborative document editor

  • gitea: Lightweight git server. Git with a cup of tea, painless self-hosted git service

  • ArchiveBox: Open source self-hosted web archiving. Takes URLs/browser history/bookmarks/Pocket/Pinboard/etc., saves HTML, JS, PDFs, media, and more

  • Wikiless: A free open source alternative Wikipedia front-end focused on privacy

  • Librarian: Alternative frontend for LBRY / Odysee.com

Redirection

  • Privacy Redirect: A simple web extension that redirects Twitter, YouTube, & Google Maps requests to privacy friendly alternatives

  • libredirect: A web extension that redirects popular sites to alternative privacy-friendly frontends and backends. Actively maintained fork of Privacy Redirect that supports Youtube, Youtube Music, Twitter, TikTok, Imgur, Reddit, Searx, Google Translate, Google Maps, Wikipedia, and Medium

  • Farside: Farside provides links that automatically redirect to working instances of privacy-oriented alternative frontends, such as Nitter, Libreddit, etc. This allows for users to have more reliable access to the available public instances for a particular service, while also helping to distribute traffic more evenly across all instances and avoid performance bottlenecks and rate-limiting.

  • UntrackMe: UntrackMe transforms Twitter, YouTube, Reddit and Medium and Wikipedia links to links of open source, privacy friendly front-ends. Converts Google Maps links to OpenStreetMap links. Removes tracking parameters from any url. Then delegates the action to other apps that are capable of handling them. (Android app)

  • Redirector: Web browser extension (Firefox, Vivaldi, Chrome, Opera, Edge) to redirect URLs based on regex or wildcard patterns.

Related projects

About this repository

This overview originally included three alternative front-ends: Invidious (for YouTube), Bibliogram (for Instagram) and Nitter (for Twitter). Therefore it was named alternative front-ends. As more projects have been added to the repository, the listed projects partially left the scope of alternative front-ends.

For example, youtube-dl is not a front-end, but can be generally described as an open source project that interacts with the internet platform Youtube.

Therefore the name alternative front-ends does not capture the full scope of the listed projects anymore. Maybe this repository will be renamed in the future to better reflect the larger scope. A possible name might be open-source-alternatives or something similar.