Right now a lot of us are trying to divest and diversify from having our entire lives on Google both because of the way Google spends its money and the long-standing privacy concerns seeming a bit more scary now.
What services have you switched to and what has your experience been? What do you like, what don’t you like, would you recommend them?
I’ve recently been thinking about this.
I’ve seen plenty of recommendations for the Proton suite, but seeing as the premium plan runs 10 bucks a month for:
- Mail (Need premium for IMAP compatibility with the Proton Bridge)
- Calendar
- Drive service --more on this one later
- VPN (this one looked nice, but IIRC VPNs are less necessary for home traffic if all my requests are HTTPS)
- Password Keeper
- And crypto wallet,
it was a mite expensive for my tastes who was only going to use the mail service and calendar and perhaps the VPN. I looked into Posteo.de and it had all that I wanted from an email provider (encryption on-server, IMAP compatibility and privacy-focused). It’s much cheaper (1 EUR/mo.) and it has a fantastically retro and sleek website (the epitome of web design-- nice-looking without being obese or fiddly).
I’m also trying out a few search engines, namely Mojeek and Marginalia-search because I want to both move away from Big Tech and Google in particular as well as open my horizon to the more human side of the web.
I have yet to figure out what to do about Android. I’m trying out using a dumb-phone for a while, but that’s more of a temporary thing.
With regards to Proton Drive, it seems nice but I’ve heard of poor Linux support. That’s a big dealbreaker for me.
I’m afraid that I can’t step away from Big G just yet; work runs off it. But one can dream. And every bit of data that Google doesn’t have is one degree fewer of control they will have over me eventually, when the Big Tech overlords pull the trigger on whatever they have cooking up.
Tried? That is boring. Stick with what we kept using.
The #1 Google service/app that I used in the past was Google Maps. I’ve replaced it with Magic Earth for the last few years and it’s been great. It uses Open Street Map for its navigation data, handles addresses very well, has live crowd-sourced traffic and hazard data, and can record rolling footage if you want it to act like a dashcam.
It works on Android and iOS, and supports Apple watch and Android car play if you use those.
For email I use Protonmail, for Google drove I use Proton Drive and my own self hosted NAS. For browsing I use several different Firefox forks like Zen, Floorp, LibreWolf, etc. UnGoogled Chromium for the rare times that a website “needs” Chrome to run.
My phone runs GrapheneOS which works great.
I’ll have to check out Magic Earth. My biggest fear switching from Google Maps was not having up to date road closures or accident reports.
The traffic data, at least in my area of the US, is pretty good.
Road closures are a rough point for sure. Generally, Magic Earth does have them marked, but not always. And the map data is only updated once a month. So even if a new closure does show up on Magic Earth, it takes several weeks to a month.
This isn’t a terrible issue for me in my area, because I know the major roads and highways decently well, but when in other states or cities, it can be a problem.
That being said, it’s still about 80% accurate on the whole. And on rare occasion, it has actually had a closure marked correctly that Google Maps didn’t.
I use F-Droid and Aurora Store on my phone and replaced the Google apps, that came preloaded on the phone, with FOSS apps. NewPipe on my phone and FreeTube on my PC to replace YouTube. I don’t use Gmail. My Google account is on a Proton account. After I am sure I have all my desired apps switched over to email sign in, I will delete the Google account. I am also switching my Proton mail for Tuta mail. Proton is on the wrong side. I also dumped Microsoft over a year ago. I have been on Linux since then. I have avoided FaceBook for over a decade and never maintained a Twitter account.
I recommend, as a bonus, to use Universal Android Debloater, it has an easy to understand GUI and it uses AndroidDebugBridge to connect to the phone via USB. It shows all the installed apps, recommends with various tiers the apps that are worth uninstalling - every app has a helpful description - and blitzes the fuckers. System or factory bloat isn’t safe from it.
I am absolutely dumb with this stuff so I have one question: how do I get all of my photos off Google cloud? That’s the only thing stopping me from shitting it down.
I also have a google pixel phone but that will be destroyed once my contract is up and I can afford something not google related
I know there are more options out there but what I have is a synology nas.
I self host the nas at home and I can still access the photos and stuff everywhere I go.
I chose synology because even though its proprietary and a little overpriced, at the time, I was short on time to learn the inner workings of free operating systems and setting up all the certificates, ddns, ports, etc.
Ofc there are also other cloud providers as well, but I use the synology for jellyfin so I killed 2 birds with one stone.
Don’t destroy your phone, you can install grapheneos(a privacy focused android distro) and it’s working great on pixels.
Interesting. Is that an app or do I need some technical know-how to implement it on my device?
Here’s the official guide https://grapheneos.org/install It’s a bit technical, but very detailed.
Awesome. Thanks friend. Just like cooking: if I follow the recipe to the tee then it should have great results
I had to change my name and hairstyle
I fucked off Google Photos and now run Immich from a Raspberry Pi with raid 1 SSDs.
Just as a small note just in case, since this data is quite irreplaceable: raid isn’t backup. Especially if the drives are of the same model, they’re fairly likely to fail at the same time. Speaking from experience sadly
I use restic for off-site backups, hosted with a friend
Yup. Sneakernet backups monthly. When I can remember.
Google Search -> Ecosia, Qwant Browser -> Vivaldi Mail, Calender -> Proton* Drive -> Proton* DNS -> Quad9 Notes -> Joplin VPN -> Proton LLM/AI -> Mistral Translate -> DeepL Maps -> Here We Go Dall-E etc -> Stability Matrix Kindle -> Pocketbook
*Planning to move everything to a NAS with Nextcloud and synch in with Jottacloud as a backup.
I see from the “View source” option that your comment has everything in a neat, line-by-line fashion, though the final markup is decidedly not.
So, a pro-tip I’ve noticed from my own commenting experience: even if you have a line break, Lemmy (for some stupid reason) won’t apply one when rendering; so if you want it to show, you have to use two line breaks, though then there will be an extra half-line or so that you probably never wanted.
For example, don’t do
Line Item 1 Line Item 2but rather do
Line Item 1 Line Item 2Yes, I agree it’s rather stupid.
It’s the way Markdown works, for reasons, which is what Lemmy uses for its comment syntax.
If you want a regular line
break, you can put two spaces
at the end of a line.Yeah I know, and I don’t like that limitation. Lol. xD
Yeah, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense here. Codeberg uses a Markdown flavor which honors single line breaks and it kind of surprised me how well that is working. Like, if you’re used to Markdown, you can put those two spaces and they’re just ignored. If you’re not used to Markdown, it works like you’d expect.
I guess, the downside is that either each client needs to configure their Markdown renderer to behave like that, or I guess, the server software has to pre-process the Markdown to add in the double-spaces.
That’s more of a problem for Lemmy than it is for Codeberg, because there is a number of different clients available.Jerboa vs. the website do different things since they render Markdown differently. Markdown itself is so spartan that it doesn’t have many things users want or need, so a bunch of incompatible forks get made & everyone just pretends it is all the same when in reality, it often lies on a single tool’s implementation.
Take AsciiDoc with its verse directive or reStructuredText with its line-block directive. Both get you poetry-style newlines on demand & are a part of the spec instead of left to the implementer.
Yeah, that’s kind of the advantage and disadvantage of Markdown. It’s so simple that alternative implementations can be easily created, which helps with adoption. But because those alternative implementations exist and because there is a need to add more features, those alternative implementations will see custom changes for the format, ultimately making the format less standardized.
I find this pretty bad since everything seems to be compatible until it is too late & it is already adopted. I would like to see more uptake of the alternatives.
Didn’t know that Codeberg did that. I’ll have to add that to my list of reasons why I love Codeberg. Lol.
Holy shit I’ve been using markdown message boards for years and
you just blew my mind
My selfhosted Nextcloud does:
- Cloud storage (including photo storage)
- Contact/Calendar/Task Sync (DAV Droid)
- Notes
- Podcast subscription and progress sync (gpodder)
While I use OSMAnd for offline navigation MAPS is still my go-to for navigation/discovering places.
My phone is currently running stock Android
What podcast apps do you use with gPodder?
Honestly I just use AntennaPod on Android. I’ve used Gpodder Desktop before but I don’t really listen to podcasts on desktop… So I don’t really need the sync but it’s nice to have especially if you’re moving phones/OS
Regarding AntennaPod it’s honestly the perfect podcast app it does everything (chapters/chapter images …) I want from a podcast app and it’s open source
Oh alright shame because I would love to find one.
I’ve heard of antennapod and did use it a couple years back. It’s good for sure
I personally use pocket casts but its proprietary afaik
Have you tried gpodder? It basically does what it says on the tin it plays podcasts (and you can subscribe to them etc.) and if you have gpodder on desktop and a gpodder compatible app (like AntennaPod) on you phone it will not only sync over your subscriptions but even you listening status, so you can just pick up where you left off.
I use Antennapod too, I really like it :)
ProtonMail was the GMail alternative for awhile, until Proton CEO did a stupid move. Otherwise, ProtonMail had actually been a great service and it was nice having a data cap of 500MB. It told me that was all I ever needed for the few years I had with it.
Firefox Forks over Chrome.
Tuta also has a free tie up to 1GB. Been slowly switching over for a few years. It isn’t perfect and you can only use the first party app for “security” but tuta supports a ton of privacy efforts within the EU also
What happened with Proton?
Proton CEO endorsed Trump. Proton’s stance has always been against Big Tech and how Big Tech is bad and that’s all well and good. But, it’s contradicting when you praise or endorse an administration that’s more than likely going to let Big Tech roll over everyone.
Was out of the loop on that so I just did the most cursory search. What do you think of this take on it?
It’s even worse. I can’t really see how someone can find anything positive to say about Republicans. I’m sorry but Non-Americans do not really know how bad Republicans really are here, until they’re faced with a party governing their country that behaves similarly to them.
Oh by the way, Net Neutrality got killed again when the BIden Administration tried appealing for it to be restored. Can you guess which party or affiliation was probably behind it? If you guessed Republican, you’d be right.
I’m just waiting for the gotcha moment to come around and Proton will one day, truly see that Republicans are not on their side.
Could this be an attempt to clean the proton name? I think it’s difficult to say anything when it comes from a source I know nothing about.
Poor article with it attempting to be a character fluff piece that completely ignores that after working at the FTC, Slater become the vice-president for legal and regulatory policy for the Internet Association lobby group. Which was founded by “small business” like Google, Amazon, eBay and Facebook.
And involved in trying to infringe upon privacy rights. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/lawmakers-must-not-let-internet-association-weaken-california-consumer-privacy-act
I never saw anyone try to claim that he was MAGA. Even if he doesn’t necessarily support Trump, the tweet is still beyond tone-deaf as it’s still painting Trump in a positive light while Trump is trampling on our rights and the constitution.
Edit -
It should also be mentioned that Trump is also actively making things worse for privacy everywhere else, so why even bother cherry-picking that one nomination? It’s obvious that the way Trump works is that if you don’t follow his word he will just fire you. Even if this nomination may have a past that might show they would do some good things for privacy, if you’re not a pawn under Trump’s control then you will just be replaced. So the whole point is moot.Additionally, look at the tweet in question “Republicans were the party of big business and Dems stood for the little guys, but today the tables have completely turned.” There is zero excuse for praising the Republican party and somehow not supporting Trump. They are directly connected and the two concepts cannot be divorced. Supporting the Republican party in any way literally means supporting Trump. Full stop.
He also conveniently ignored that after working at the FTC, Slater become the vice-president for legal and regulatory policy for the Internet Association lobby group. Which was founded by “small business” like Google, Amazon, eBay and Facebook.
And involved in trying to infringe upon privacy rights. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/lawmakers-must-not-let-internet-association-weaken-california-consumer-privacy-act
So yeah, proton founder cherry picked information that tried to make it seem like it was acceptable to praise the pick when reality is the past is too murky to endorse in any manner. And that medium article that gets floated around ignores Internet Association too, so wouldn’t be shocking if it was from proton attempting to do PR damage fixating on identity politics with intentional omission of Internet Association involvement.
Proton CEO endorsed Trump
This is a blatant lie. That never happened.
Not a blatant lie, but somewhat of an exaggeration. He praised Trump, then praised the Republican party while denigrating the Democrats in the same sentence.
He did not “praise Trump”, he praised a single appointment that he made. This is the kind of tribal toxic bullshit that stifles any sort of progress. If Trump does something right (not that he did), you need to be allowed to say that without being accused of being a nazi or someone claiming that you “endorsed” him.
You’re literally in denial of the definition of words.
Trump is a felon, a rapist, and a liar among other things. If you don’t acknowledge that he’s a scumbag while you give him an expression of approval then it makes it seem you approve of the person overall. If there was something Trump did right and people wanted to talk about that, then it would be pretty simple to say something like “Trump sucks, but…” That’s not a crazy expectation and that’s not “tribal toxic bullshit”.
Imagine if someone was saying something like “It’s nice that John Wayne Gacy participated in fundraisers and entertained the children” or “Thanks to Jeffery Dahmer for his military service” without acknowledging the horrible things they did.
You’re literally in denial of the definition of words.
No. You are.
If you don’t acknowledge that he’s a scumbag while you give him an expression of approval then it makes it seem you approve of the person overall.
It may “seem” that way to you if you’re not objective but it doesn’t make it true.
That’s not a crazy expectation
It actually is a crazy and ridiculous expectation.
Proton CEO endorsed Trump
Even that’s a bit of a stretch. He approved one thing Trump did. It wasn’t blanket praise for everything Trump has done. He also didn’t condemn everything Democratic, just one thing.
I don’t see why approval of one thing someone did constitutes automatic approval of everything. What if Trump has an amazing recipe for a ham and cheese toastie? Would liking that recipe make me a Putin sympathiser? Of course not.
You’re going down a slippery slope fallacy.
First off, endorsing means that you have a public approval of or support of so it doesn’t mean what you twisted it up as. So when I say he endorsed Trump, I am saying that he supported or approved something he did, not saying that he’s a MAGA voter. Contexts and learning what words are used in them is kind of important. Maybe you ought to learn that sometime.
Secondly, I don’t give a flying fuck if Trump ever made some recipe, the old bastard is going around doing too much shit that outweighs any positive thing he’s done. Any positive thing he’s done, we would’ve much have rather it be someone else and not him, because of the amount of stigma that surrounds him because of the shit he’s done that has affected millions.
That’s literally saying and I really hate beating this dead horse, but it’s saying Hitler actually did make some good art pieces, so we should ignore the fact that he was the executor of a grand scale war that costed millions of lives and hosted a death march on those he didn’t like.
when I say he endorsed Trump, I am saying that he supported or approved something he did
Then you are misinformed about what it means to endorse someone. Or just intentionally twisting the definition to allow for ragebait. Contexts and learning what words are used in them is kind of important. Maybe you ought to learn that sometime.
I don’t give a flying fuck if Trump ever made some recipe
They didn’t ask if you cared about a recipe. You’re tossing aside the point of their comment and getting on your pedestal to rant.
I really hate beating this dead horse, but it’s saying Hitler actually did make some good art pieces, so we should ignore the fact that he was the executor of a grand scale war
Saying “Hitler made good art pieces” would also not be an endorsement.
I already mentioned this elsewhere, but he did praise Trump and platform him, then he praised the Republican party saying they are the party of “the little guys” (small business), which is just flat out wrong. He does not acknowledge that there are an abundance of things Trump is doing that is fucking awful and disgusting. At best it’s an extremely tone-deaf tweet. What that does do, though, is paint Trump and the Republican party in a very good light. That’s effectively an endorsement without saying it in exact words.
Also, it’s so very obvious that anyone associated with Trump absolutely needs to abide by Trump’s every whim or else he will replace you. So, the point he was trying to make is entirely moot in the first place.
There is just no way to praise Trump or the Republican party without showing your ignorance or alignment with them. Just like you can’t just have a little bit of shit in your food. Once you’ve got even a little bit of shit in your food, then you’ve got shit-food.
I tried to minimize my dependency on Google by signing up for various email services like Petal Mail by Huawei, Proton Mail, and Yandex Mail. I also tried to find smartphones that don’t have Google by default, such as Murena smartphones and Huawei smartphones. But it seems like it’s too late to look for those gems without Google because I have so many apps that I bought on Google, amounting to around five digits in Malaysian Ringgit, which is not cheap. So I think I’ll stay with Google for now, sadly.
Desktop Environment
-
Operating System: Fedora Workstation Linux
- Great package manager updates
- Excellent performance
-
Productivity Tools:
- Note-taking: Zim Wiki (preferred for GUI and plaintext storage)
- Document Editing: Considering OnlyOffice if Collabora Office doesn’t work out
- Backup Solution: Filen cloud provider with desktop sync app
-
Browsers:
- Primary: Firefox with Arkenfox
- Backup: Ungoogled Chromium (for sites incompatible with Firefox)
-
Password Management:
- Bitwarden (kept on phone)
- KDE Connect for clipboard sharing between devices
Mobile Setup
-
Device & OS: Pixel 8 Pro running GrapheneOS
- More stable and polished than previous CalyxOS on Pixel 5
- Better Google Play sandboxing compared to microG
-
Mobile Apps:
- Browsers: IronFox and Vanadium
- App Sources: Primarily open-source from GitHub/F-Droid, updated via Obtainium
- Non-FOSS Apps: Sandboxed Google Play for banking and other essential apps
- Maps: HERE WeGo (previously used Magic Earth but it lacked public transport info)
- Loyalty Cards: Catima
-
Search Engine: Kagi
- Quality results
- Sound business model (subscription-based)
- Fediverse integration for Lemmy search
-
Self-Hosted Services:
- Contacts and calendar via Radicale on NAS with Nginx
-
Car Integration:
- Still using Android Auto (found MagSafe holder alternatives more distracting)
- Physical cards stored in MagSafe wallet on phone back
-
These are what I use:
Browsers: Fennec, LibreWolf
Email Clients: K-9, Fair Email, Proton Mail, Thunderbird
Pictures: Fossify Camera, Fossify Gallery
File Sharing: Proton Drive
YouTube: Tubular
SMS Messaging: Textra (It’s not FOSS, but unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a FOSS app in existence that shows the actual name of the person who’s sent the message in group chats. They just show an icon, which isn’t enough for me to keep track)
App store: Droid-ify (F-Droid), Aurora Store
Password Manager: Bitwarden
eBook Reader: Librera FD
Books: Bookwyrm
Translation: LibreTranslator
Calendar: Proton Calendar
What I can’t find good alternatives for:
YouTube itself - enough said
Phone screen translation - I still use Google Assistant, and I’m not aware of anything else that grabs and translates all text on my phone screen
Maps - Rant time. This one is so annoying because there are FOSS navigation apps based on OpenStreetMap that are excellent in every way except one that makes them unusable for me: Using POV navigation instead of observing the convention of up = north. I did find one that lets you maintain a normal map view during navigation, but it doesn’t keep your position centered automatically, which makes it impossible to use while driving. I have no idea who all you deranged people are who actually like the POV navigation, but there are definitely a lot of you because I can’t find a replacement for Google Maps. I even tried Mapquest because at least it’s not Google, but when I tried using it to navigate the first time, it somehow autocorrected “St” to “Ave” and I ended up lost lol. This maps situation really grinds my gears. I do still try to contribute as much as I can to OSM though because it’s an important project, and hopefully someday an uninsane developer will make a proper alternative to Google Maps.
Interesting, I’ve had the exact opposite problem with Osmand last summer: Could not get it to use POV mode (not smart enough to navigate otherwise when cycling), it was always stuck on North Is Up (there’s a button to change that on the upper left corner which they now changed to click and hold so I have my hopes up that it’ll work now).
I’m pretty sure Osmand centers the map in North Is Up mode but I’m not 100% certain.
I wonder if Osmand is the one I tried that was so close to being usable for me, but didn’t keep my location centered when North was up. I spent a day trying everything I could find, so I can’t recall exactly. I’ll give it a go though and see if it works.
I don’t think you’ll have much trouble finding one that works the way you want it because everything I tried used POV as the default for some perplexing reason. (Like if I was facing East for example, then East was up.)
FreeTube is a good replacement for YouTube on PC and NewPipe is good on Android phones.
Yeah Tubular is basically NewPipe with Sponsorblock. I’ll give Freetube a try.
What I mean though is … it’s still YouTube, y’know?
Oh, and I go back and forth between Sear XNG and Startpage for search engine. I know Startpage is Bad, but there’s no search engine in existence that really makes me happy.
I have no idea who all you deranged people are who actually like the POV navigation
I use both POV and up=north depending on my use case. For some routes where I don’t care about the details of the route I find it useful to have the POV view with what I need now zoomed in and correctly oriented and what I’ll need soon still visible and smaller but still distinguishable.
The problem with up=north is that when you’ve zoomed right in to see the detail, all the wider view stuff is missing, especially when out of built-up zones. It’d be better if the detail level would be replaced/augmented with a detail density setting, so that when you’re out in the sticks with only you, a small single track road with grass down the middle and one sheep visible all the way up to the horizon in any direction that you don’t have to zoom right in to the individual blades of grass before you see the road you’re on.
Other times I do care about the route, and in those cases I’ll use up=north and manual zoom as needed. I still get caught out though when travelling south and the arrow pointing left means I need to turn right.
When I first saw POV I thought it was a stupid gimmick. But then I tried it out and really liked it, but not always.
I always like seeing the details, and I can’t imaging looking at a map and up not being north. It would be like reading a book turned sideways – hypothetically I could do it, but it would require far more brainpower to interpret than it’s worth. I do like my location kept as the centerpoint though. That’s really nice, but apparently hard to implement. The “re-center” feature on Google Maps is my friend.
Would you mind hitting us with a direct link to tubular? This is one of the biggest hindrances to getting completely off google
Sure, no problem: https://f-droid.org/packages/org.polymorphicshade.tubular/
I can’t get it to work. It works for you?
Yes, I just checked, and it’s working. You shouldn’t have to do anything special either.
The only thing I have trouble with sometimes is watching videos YouTube has flagged as age-restricted videos or whatever. I have to click “watch in browser” and open them in Firefox while signed in. But I rarely encounter this.
You could check their github and see if anyone else has had a problem, but the link I gave you is the version I use.
Thanks ♥️
I use Ad Nauseum. Why degoogle when you can actively cost them money?
It seems interesting
What’s Ad Nauseum? What does it do and why do you like it?
As per their website:
As online advertising becomes ever more ubiquitous and unsanctioned, AdNauseam works to complete the cycle by automating ad clicks universally and blindly on behalf of its users. Built atop uBlock Origin, AdNauseam quietly clicks on every blocked ad, registering a visit on ad networks’ databases. As the collected data gathered shows an omnivorous click-stream, user tracking, targeting and surveillance become futile
Yep that’s it. It’s not only an ad blocker, but an a huge middle finger to the ad industry. Leaving this on for a few weeks can cause thousands in damages. And you can set it up to only do this to tracking ads. It’s pretty neat. You definitely should not run this with an extension that frequently refreshes the page though. That would definitely be a very bad idea if everyone did that.
Firefox.
Immich for photos
Radicale for calendar and contacts
My own mail domain and server, for mail
Lineages on android
The only thing I cannot do without, is google maps.
