Free Republic

Now that Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover is complete, many people are suddenly turning to Mastodon in their hunt for alternative venues for tweet-like social media consumption. Mastodon hews close to Twitter’s overall style, with “toots” instead of tweets and “boosts” instead of retweets, along with mentions, hashtags, and a chronological feed. The key difference is that Mastodon has no ads, no creepy data mining, and no centralized ownership. It can be a little tricky to set up, though, and you may quickly discover that its attempts to clone Twitter are at odds with its decentralized nature. But don’t let that...

While 2020 has been brutal on the whole, it’s been an unusually fruitful year for apps. In part, that’s because of the coronavirus pandemic, which has upended the ways we live and work for the foreseeable future. We’ve seen a glut of new and upgraded tools for working from home, of course, along with more apps to help us preserve our mental well-being. To avoid the obvious, this list of 2020’s best apps won’t include the likes of Zoom and Slack—the stuff you already know about. But our mix does include some lesser-known ways to make those apps even better....