Alt Web

Credits

Alt Web stands on other people’s work.
The code that builds it, the fonts, the icons and the server it runs on are open source projects, written and maintained by people who give their time to help.
Much of what we know about the alternatives comes from Wikipedia, and from cooperatives, associations and public agencies that explain what they do in the open. Thank you.

We also use AI, mainly Claude from Anthropic and OpenAI, for a big part of the programming, for research and for first drafts of translations. We write some of the code ourselves and read what the AI writes. We speak English, French and German, so we can check every text in all three before it goes online.

Building the site

  • Astro: turns the texts into the site’s static pages. By Fred K. Schott and the Astro team, now part of Cloudflare. MIT.
  • Vite: the build tool behind Astro. By Evan You and the Vite team. MIT.
  • Tailwind CSS: the styles. By Adam Wathan and Tailwind Labs. MIT.
  • TypeScript: the language of the code. By Microsoft, designed by Anders Hejlsberg. Apache 2.0.
  • Zod: checks that every page has the fields it needs. By Colin McDonnell. MIT.
  • MiniSearch: the search box. By Luca Ongaro. MIT.
  • Satori and sharp: draw the images shown when a page is shared. By Vercel and Lovell Fuller. MPL 2.0 and Apache 2.0.
  • culori: computes the colours of the themes and checks their contrast. By Dan Cărbunaru. MIT.
  • @astrojs/sitemap and @astrojs/markdown-satteri: the sitemap for search engines and the Markdown processor. By the Astro team. MIT.
  • Node.js and pnpm: run the build and install the packages. Node.js was created by Ryan Dahl and is run by the OpenJS Foundation; pnpm is by Zoltan Kochan. MIT.

Fonts and icons

  • Nunito, by Vernon Adams, Cyreal and Jacques Le Bailly: the site’s font, served by Fontsource. SIL Open Font License.
  • Inter, by Rasmus Andersson: the font of the share images. SIL Open Font License.
  • Twemoji: the category icons, recoloured for the site. Created by Twitter, now kept up by its community. CC BY 4.0.

Testing and tools

  • Vitest and Playwright: the unit tests and the browser tests. Vitest by Anthony Fu, Matías Capeletto and the Vitest team, Playwright by Microsoft. MIT and Apache 2.0.
  • Astro check and DefinitelyTyped: type checking. By the Astro team, and by Boris Yankov and thousands of contributors. MIT.
  • yaml, linkedom and Turndown: read data files and turn web pages into text for our scripts. By Eemeli Aro, Andrea Giammarchi and Dom Christie. ISC, ISC and MIT.
  • OpenSpec: how we plan and describe each change before writing it. By Fission AI. MIT.
  • The Anthropic and OpenAI libraries: let our scripts ask an AI for a second reading of the texts. MIT and Apache 2.0.

Hosting

  • Docker: packages the site. By Docker, Inc., created by Solomon Hykes. Apache 2.0.
  • nginx: serves the pages. Created by Igor Sysoev, now developed by F5. BSD.
  • Coolify: deploys the site on our server. By Andras Bacsai. Apache 2.0.
  • Let’s Encrypt: the free certificates behind the padlock, from the Internet Security Research Group, a non-profit.
  • Umami: counts visits without cookies. By Mike Cao. MIT.

Shared knowledge

  • Wikipedia: many alternative pages list it among their sources.
  • The cooperatives, associations and public agencies whose own pages, reports and labels we read, and the guides and directories on our Resources and Directories pages.