NebLem

Only thing not really mentioned in the other comments are Pixelfed and PeerTube. Again you gotta make genuine stuff not ads but if you put at least some effort in the videos and post semi regularly (and ideally use your own instance) you’ll be top in whatever niche you choose to highlight your business with. I can’t say the garden tending would make great business sense (it won’t bring you many new customers) but if the work you do is your passion, its another outlet to share it. Its also not bad to have your own (labeled) ad channel (on your instance), archives can bring nostalgia / meme material, but local only, and don’t boost them.

I don’t think it’d be bad to have your own threadiverse and microblogging platform instances for support and slice of life type stories, but that’s for interacting with existing customers and fans, not for gaining new ones. I’d caution interacting outside of your instance in that space unless pinged / mentioned directly, even more carefully than you would in other socials.

You all exit your editor? How you do the rest of your computing?

/s with ♡ from an Emacs fan.

Yeah I’m probably in the same boat, got love being an old.

You can always just subscribe to your favorite creators via RSS instead of relying on their subscription tools. It does kill some discovery potential but its not like you still don’t get recommendations when going to the video.

Almost all alternatives will be based on Open Street Map (OSM), and your mileage will very on the amount of detail from your local contributors. The two I primarily use are:

CoMaps (community fork of Organic Maps) has a clean intuitive interface and a decent router algorithm. Lots of developer energy and good community governance. Offline first, allows some OSM editing, quick to load and routing. Downsides are its limited feature set and configuration.

OsmAnd is a bit older but includes more routing options, near full OSM point of interests (POIs, locations like stores, buildings, etc) editing options, shows more POI types (configurable but can get noisy), has optional Mapillary (community Streetview style project unfortunately ran by Meta) integration, optional weather data, over and under layers from other sources, and optionally incorporates Wikipedia and Wikivoyage data filling in some gaps. Its interface is a bit more clunky, and somewhat slower, but it does a lot. Get the OSMAnd~ version from Fdroid, which has most of the “pro” (paid) version but without Google services. The actual paid version does have Google reviews and more POI search engine, but you’re using Google again.

Both are offline first but also both suffer from no review system integrations or traffic integrations (no Waze/GMaps reporting of slow downs or speed traps).

https://marginalia-search.com/ is pretty great for a different approach to search. While not exactly what you were asking for since its free, you can definitely pay via donations if you find it valuable.

And if you don’t want Signal because its “too centralized” for whatever reason, there’s DeltaChat, SimpleX, and good ol’ XMPP.

My next post after this one was https://lemmy.world/post/34898968 (a story about a Baidu taxi driving into a construction pit) in my home feed.

Hopefully the EU itself can provide its own competitor in this space and that the EU actually enforces its own privacy and safety laws against this behemoth.