It would be great if there was a good way to find existing projects that achieve what we seek. Usually, the biggest names are visible, and it's hard to find alternatives that achieve specific ideas.

I suspect we need some sort of search engine that helps push us towards the alternate stuff.

Currently google tends to highlight the big sites/authoritative sources etc, and not the smaller blogs/forums/etc as much.

We basically need some filter against the winners that take all. Block off the top 10-20% sites and only show the long tail.

Oddly enough, I find page 2 (and beyond) of Google results to be incredibly different than page 1 in the way that you describe. When shopping, for example, (in normal search, not the Shopping tab) I'll often have heard of every store on page 1 and almost no stores on page 2+. Using default of 10 results per page.

There is a website called alternative.to which kinda does this for most things, it’s user maintained but it works pretty well for most things, but sometimes fails for smaller projects

Look up the HN launch post and read the top level comments promoting other solutions?

oh cool, didn't knew that existed!

Interesting idea. How long is it around I wonder, it feels like it hasn't taken off yet. The bloggers there seem to perhaps come from a similar viewpoint, guardianista, I'd call it. If someone starts blogging what they might feel to be an unacceptable viewpoint, more torygraph what then, I wonder? Is it a curated timeline? Can they censor like Twitter does? What's the essential difference from a free speech point of view between this site and the existing social networks?