Toppleware is something that a community builds and adopts in order to overthrow an existing tool, product or service, usually one that has achieved near ubiquity or monopoly, be it through market capture, tradition, “network effect” or by government mandate.
Toppleware /ˈtɑpəlwɛr/
(noun) tools, products or services made to replace a dominant incumbent.
[as modifier]: the community devised their own e-commerce toppleware, reducing their reliance on amazon.com
The term combines the words Topple-, (to remove from power; overthrow: disagreement had threatened to topple the government), and -ware (relating to the characters of the articles or the use to which they are put, as: chinaware, hardware, software).
The purpose of making toppleware is to “overthrow” an existing thing, by building and driving adoption of a copy or clone of it, but with other values in its design, ownership and governance.
Examples of Toppleware:
Social media: Mastodon – joinmastodon.org Topples: Twitter An open source social media platform that is similar to Twitter. Unlike twitter, however, it's developed and maintained by a nonprofit organisation, it's code is free and available for anyone to download, run and modify, and it's news feeds are free of secret algorithms and advertisements designed to capture your attention and steal your data. Mastodon is built on ActivityPub, an underlying piece of technology that allows independent communities to run their own mastodon-servers and federate with others.
Other examples social media toppleware: PeerTube, pixelfed, Loops, writefreely.
Maps: OpenStreetMap – Website Topples: Google Maps, Apple Maps A volunteer-driven, open source map database. Online maps have become an essential part of most people's lives, but there's an inherent vulnerability in relying on a small group of privately owned, predominantly american cloud software for what could be considered essential digital infrastructure. Communities and nations who would want to rely less on these few companies are building apps that uses their own local knowledge, without the risk of their data being harvested, or their search results being manipulated by a secret algorithm.
Creative software: Blender Topples: 3D Studio Max, Autodesk Maya Blender is a great example of a successful non-profit community-driven project. Where for-profit giants like Adobe want to lock you in to exorbitantly priced cloud subscriptions, Blender topples the notion that creative tools should be locked behind a golden door.
Local Activism: Dukop dukop.dk Topples: Facebook events Dukop is a grass-roots event calendar for activism in Denmark and southern sweden. It's an attempt to organise digitally without relying on social media platforms such as those owned by Meta, and the risk of censorship and surveillance that is brought with it.
Medical Pipetting device Youtube Topples: Overpriced medical equipment Maker “It's Triggy!” creates an open source “multi-channel pipette system for 96-well plates” that normally costs $18,000, for $300.
These are not perfect examples, but this word just popped into my head and so I had to write an article about it. Perhaps this might inspire someone else to develop the idea further.
Hannibal Glaser CC BY-SA 4.0