Organize into categories

[tukkek]

Although very useful and a great reference, this list is very big with almost 200 projects in it. It is definitely time consuming and cognitively hard to scan through it, even if you know what type of project you are looking for.

I think that separating the projects into categories would be a simple solution to improving readability, navigability and overall usefulness. The entries in the list also seem to always fit into a single category, without much overlap: you won't find a project that is an entirely new secure networking protocol and also a social networking website (and even if you do it usually will count only as a social network project, with the new protocol being just a means to an end, hypothetically speaking).

My first read through the list suggested several categories already:

• networking (new protocols)
• social networks (gnu social, diaspora...)
• hosting (for website hosters or projects that setup a full server using Docker, etc)
• cloud (for all dropbox and cloud alternatives)
• communication (for P2P messaging/chat applications)
• collaboration (multi-user text editing, planning, etc)
• suites (for "all in one" type packages that mostly aggregate different packages or software)
• general (for everything else that doesn't fit clearly on any other category)

I'm writing this from memory so it's not by any means a refined or comprehensive list but hopefully it'll be clear how far this incremental improvement would go in drastically increasing navigability to the project (especially if paired with #239 ).

[rossjones]

The README definitely needs a clean up, and the previous JSON->OHLOH->Readme scripts broke some time ago and nobody had any time to replace them with something that worked.

I've going to merge all the JSON files into a README in the v.near future and then start to try and add categories to it and put things in the right place. Your list is a great start, so if you don't mind I'll just adapt that.

[tukkek]

if you don't mind I'll just adapt that

Don't mind it at all! Glad you found it helpful, at least as a starting point :)

Thanks for the effort put into this great project - as chance would have I was just linking to it recently!

[rossjones]

I've arbitrarily decided to move back to a single README (see #242) with a simple page that looks like (https://github.com/redecentralize/alternative-internet/blob/e9c3916fde67ca8e8d55fa1a7f40f3c3f511c3b6/README.md).

I'd like to categorise the rest of the items, and then maybe add badges for active,inactive projects.

WDYT, should I merge it (and then categorise)?

[tukkek]

I think it's an improvement! If I were to add anything, it would be a short description in the list at the top, briefly explaining what category is.