these comics are well known for their alt text

It’s title text, or in web comic circles, hover text. The linked comic’s alt is simply Lisp Cycles.

I also want quotes back instead of screenshots of text.

Ah yes, I bet thou canst also skip the booting part when thou runst software on thy compooter. And Jehovah (or an idol of thy choice) forbids any configuration or upgrade requiring a reboot.

Any domain registrar/hosting provider that does not require propietary software to run?

If thou dissectst this even more clearly thou wouldof noticed OP asked about running a domain registrar or hosting provider, not using their service. Also the word was propietary.

Now, if thou excuse OP’s imperfect English thou can find a clearer description below:

one that can be used without running nonfree programs

Like virginity, it’s either with or without innit, or doth thou prefer thy olive oil lightly fucked?

static sites [are] not suitable for any business or professional use

I wouldn’t agree with this statement, there are plenty of businesses and professionals who are only on the interwebs to share their contact, biography or product knowledge base.

That being said, there are VPS providers running on libre software like vpsFree.cz which I use and can recommend. There should be more out there but I don’t keep track them, sorry.

There’s much thinner chance there exists a registrar caring about thee or thy software freedom though. People at sr.ht, LLC talks about setting up one but so far it’s just talks.

OpenNIC registrar (only be.libre seems to be functional) work without JS and thou can prolly ask them to license the site freely but non-ICANN domains are not practical for business or professional use due to the low adoption.

once

I get thy stand on this, personally I also have to compromise my software freedom to register my domains, but again OP asked to avoid X and saying after doing X you won’t have to is not answering the question.

The question wasn’t about avoiding installing but running proprietary software.

The separation is pedantic, but you can have dynamic websites without JS or with free ones. The argument is basically the server-side software only see the data you input, but client-side malware can extract information or do other nasty things you can’t observe or prevent.

Gandy or namecheap

I’m pretty sure they require proprietary client-side scripts to function as well.

Pleroma and Akkoma FE can also display conversations as trees.

I use mpv with yt-dlp.

Guess what, you can run Vim inside Emacs inside Vim inside Emacs now!

:q!<CR> is equivalent to ZQ

if I sent you a private message, is that viewable in plain text by not just the instance owner we’re both on

Yes.

other federated instances too?

Not by design, but instances can misbehave.

private messaging over AP

Private is misleading here: for messaging to be private, no third party should be able to read the messages. In practice, this usually requires end-to-end encryption.

I’ve been using disroot.org for a few years and it does what I expect. Recently I started a maddy.email server on a VPS and it’s easier than I thought.

doesn’t collect my data and its [sic] secure as well

To quote cock.li,

How can I trust you?

You can’t. Cock.li doesn’t parse your E-mail to provide you with targeted ads, nor does cock.li read E-mail contents unless it’s for a legal court order. However, it is 100% possible for me to read E-mail, and IMAP/SMTP doesn’t provide user-side/client-side encryption, so you’re just going to have to take my word for it. Any encryption implementation would still technically allow me to read E-mail, too. This was true for Lavabit as well – while your E-mail was stored encrypted (only if you were a paid member, which most people forget), E-mail could still technically be intercepted while being received / sent (SMTP), or while being read by your mail client (IMAP). For privacy, we recommend encrypting your E-mails using PGP using a mail client add-on like Enigmail, or downloading your mail locally with POP and regularly deleting your mail from our server.

We use Maddy, which is pretty easy to set up.

isync can be used for archiving IMAP into maildir format, which is readable by all MUAs.

Its market share defeats the point of self-hosting.

If you have a static IPv6 address you can host your own authoritative DNS locally and use it for IPv4.

I use Liferea, which

• Discovers web feeds from web page’s alternate link
• Embeds WebKit to render HTML in full
• Supports RSS comments
• Has configurable enclosure handler, so I can open YouTube in mpv

I think group is to be implemented in Mastodon soon™. Qoto’s fork already did, and some other microblogging implementations like GNU Social and Frendica had supported such feature since before Mastodon (the software) even existed.