Is your tech stack ethical?
I just launched a blog and published an article about choosing ethical technology. I think it's especially relevant to the Indie Hackers community, since we're always making technology choices about our side projects!
For example, I use Fathom for my app's analytics instead of subjecting all my users to surveillance via GA. I think it's awful that GitHub helps ICE round up undocumented people, so I'm hosting the source code on GitLab. Basically, I'm trying to only give money or data to companies that I feel are ethical themselves.
What ethical technology choices are y'all making?
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Great article. I just shared it over on Reddit.
It gives me an idea: A database of ethical ratings for technologies based on various aspects (privacy, workers rights, etc). Then build tools that you can point at a website or repository that analyzes the technologies used by the site or repository and generates an ethics report, including suggestions for alternatives.
Hey, thanks a lot! If you build or come across something like that, let me know. I'll definitely post it.
My post was removed by the Reddit moderators. No idea why! After all, /r/technology is:
I read the rules before posting, and didn't see anything to suggest the article was not appropriate.
We were very keen not to use privacy invading analytics tools on our website so we opted for Plausible.io mainly because we knew the founder and liked the cut of their jib. https://plausible.io/ I also love that we don't have to issue a cookie notice.
In the authentication space, we are exploring our own privacy messaging for https://did.app because passwordless auth at the moment is achieved primarily with OAuth Facebook / Google / Twitter logins and I'm not sure this falls into the ethical camp very well. What are your thoughts on this?
When a user signs in with Facebook, facebook now knows about that and uses that information to build a profile and so on.
We wanted to cut through that and create a privacy respecting alternative to give users a choice. At the moment, if you do care about privacy you're kinda forced to go the old fashioned route of username and password. It seems a little unfair.
We're struggled so far to get much traction with this privacy / ethical angle though. Maybe I was reaching out to the wrong audience. As someone who may care more about privacy does this message kinda make sense? Does it wash?
Shared on Twitter. Planning to spin up fantom on the digital ocean to replace GA. I can help anyone with no-code background to do that
I've used my own implementation of Matomo for a few projects now. Open source GA alternative.
So you're self–hosting? That's pretty cool; even though I'm fairly happy with Fathom, I've been considering doing that just to get rid of as many transitive AWS dependencies as possible.
Yup! I believe Fathom can be self hosted (one click) on Digital Ocean as well if I'm not mistaken.
I agree in general. For me personally I don't have issues with GitHub at all, but I couldn't bring myself to implementing Facebook logins so far. Also just signed up for Fathom this weekend :).
Holy hell. As someone who lives in Mexico this is an important topic for me. I had no idea!
Yeah, it’s pretty horrible 😕 Not sure if you’ve heard of Fund Club (if not: it’s monthly email newsletter that picks a organization supporting social justice in tech, and the recipients donate $100) but their picks for the past few months have been organizations fighting ICE. http://joinfundclub.com/
Just joined it! And thank you so much for bringing this awareness to the Indie Hackers! I'm definitely looking into switching to GitLab for my personal projects (plus, it's another skill I can add to my resume).
This is definitely a change all devs have to consider sooner. I’m building https://blocksurvey.io on top of Blockstack currently. Refrained from using GA from the beginning.
That's awesome, congrats!
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Thank you so much! That's why I wrote it — it's so easy to get wrapped up in the excitement of building our own projects that we can forget about the externalities.