Over the past few years there has been a renewed interest in 'alternative' on-line services such as social media and chat¹. These are services that promise to provide different experiences and models to the ones we are used to seemingly for free from corporations like Google, Facebook and Apple.

Some of these alternatives are that in name only. These alternatives promise to be something else from the start, but often end up being more of the same since they use similar or identical business models as the platform they pretend to be an alternative to. In essence a different brand serving the same product.