Most of my alt-tech stuff I've found are services I've been directly able to run, I haven't really been "deep" on the internet persay. I just have my stuff that I run and a few other places that I check from time to time.
But to get started, Ive been absolutely loving mumble as a sort-of alternative to discord's voice chatting system. Its not a full on chat platform like discord, but where it is similar to discord, it is so much better. Latency-wise its been the lowest latency that I know of, and its super easy to get people started with it because it doesn't rely on logins and whatnot, instead it ties a unique identifier to your machine itself so you don't have to remember a login in order to use mumble.
Another thing that I've been enjoying is freexiv what Im running is a heavily modified fork of the original project, but its a really lightweight pixiv frontend. The original is quite barebones and ugly, so I have been hacking on it for the past couple of months and have greatly improved it from the original. Its still not fully working as I want it to, but that is probably due to pixiv and how content is fetched more than anything.
Gitea is also really great if you're looking to have your own git repositories without much setup hassle.
