PurchaseWithPurpose

Reasons until now

Increasingly, every time a new guide is shared, people ask for a link or struggle with the image itself. I've avoided that because 1) I didn't know (and still don't) whether this would turn into anything substantial. 2) I felt Reddit, Lemmy and other communities were good enough as a platform.

Is now the right time (some stats)

It appears that there is a strong and continued interest in finding alternatives that might justify putting more time into it.

• Reddit shows 1M+ views across all posts over the last 1-2 months
  • Although this will be inflated, this doesn't include other platforms such as Lemmy (no stats here), BlueSky and LinkedIn (apparently was posted there a few times)
• There has been a lot of engagement with people asking questions - 10k+ comments
• The movement was growing at about 1k per week - not bad!
• It is becoming challenging to have all the different versions up-to-date and easily accessible

Benefits of a site

• Easier to maintain the latest versions without re-posts
• Easier to navigate between guides/options
• Easier to share with others
• Most importantly, track impact!
  • A common question is, "Is this even making a difference?". This way, we can track the actual monetary impact, which tools people choose, and why.
  • This will help keep individuals motivated to do more and attract new people to the different causes.

Current ideas for a site

• Three tiers to compare different options
  • The full guide with 3-4 per category
  • A deep dive guide per category with recommendations and opinionated groupings
  • A detailed table per category with features to filter and sort by
• Profile to track the impact
  • Your monetary impact per month/year
  • How many people have you referred, along with their impact
  • What is the global community's impact to date
• It will be open-sourced and try to avoid any of the big-tech providers (where possible)
  • I will sponsor the hosting and can do the full development
  • It should take about ~2 weeks to get up and running

That said, I am already struggling to keep up with 2 weekly updates (a new deep-dive guide and category to the overall guide). For this to become a reality, I will need your help, great or small!

What can you do?

• Please comment on whether you would use such a website, and share any ideas.
• If anyone has experience with Vuejs (or React) and would like to contribute, that would be more than appreciated!
• If anyone has experience with Figma (or equivalent) and would like to contribute, that would be more than appreciated!
• If anyone is interested in helping with the research, please let me know. Shoutout again to u/MegSpen725, who has helped the last few weeks!

You can either DM me or comment below on any of the above.

Even if this doesn't materialise, it has been amazing to see the engagement and growth of the movement!

Fastmail has their servers in the us and is located in australia - @heavydust@sh.itjust.works - comment

Infomaniak is not swedish - @kalistia@sh.itjust.works - comment

• Rather it is swiss - me - comment

Lemmy is open to the point that on some instances you can see who voted on what - @RisingSwell@lemmy.dbzer0.com - comment

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/35236593

I feel like a version of this guide gets reposted weekly, but it's always out of date.

u/theFallenWalnut over on that other site updates these regularly.

They also now link to !purchasewithpurpose@lemmy.world but I don't see anything posted there. Maybe a better place to start reposting these

Mine isn't all that fancy, lol.

The focus has been more on the digital realm, which is important, but would something focused on physical purchases be useful? I could see that getting unwieldy as well, so perhaps something like this would be better as a wiki page

First! Also, I wanted to continue the discussion over from this thread on the Other Site. Changing your OS is much harder than the other changes, I think, but it would still be good to include.

Linux Mint - My preference, since it's the easiest for a new user to get into. I would feel confident teaching my grandparents how to use it

OpenBSD - This is the most secure, so anyone who is privacy focused would want this one. All linux distros are inherently more secure than windows (open source, don't come packed with adware, etc.), but this is OpenBSD's goal.

Then, you'd probably want a distro that works well on old laptops (why buy a new laptop if a 10-year old laptop can do the job fine?) Linux, in general, is a lot less resource-intensive than Windows anyways, but there are a few distros that are specifically built for old or tiny computers. Alpine Linux might be the smallest, but Lubuntu is probably better for user support. I haven't done much with either of them outside of some VMs here and there, so hopefully someone else has some good experience with "light" distros and can chime in.

It's real easy to get into the weeds on the "best" open source distro, so I'd recommend including one that's user friendly, one that's really secure, and one that's really good at running on old/obsolete hardware.