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?

  •  venotic   ( @venotic@kbin.melroy.org ) 
    13•7 days ago

    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.

      •  venotic   ( @venotic@kbin.melroy.org ) 
        18•7 days ago

        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.

        •  letsgo   ( @letsgo@lemm.ee ) English
          5•6 days ago

          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.

          •  venotic   ( @venotic@kbin.melroy.org ) 
            4•6 days ago

            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.

            •  Ulrich   ( @Ulrich@feddit.org ) English
              1•6 days ago

              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.

          •  venotic   ( @venotic@kbin.melroy.org ) 
            2•6 days ago

            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.

          •  stardust   ( @stardust@lemmy.ca ) English
            1•6 days ago

            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

  •  rraggl   ( @rraggl@feddit.nl ) 
    9•6 days ago
    • Desktop: Linux (Tuxedo)
    • Browser: Vivaldi
    • Search: Ecosia & DDG
    • Mail / Groupware / Calendar / Contacts / Cloud Drive / Meet: Infomaniak kSuite Pro
    • Backup: Syncthing
    • Movies / Netflix / Amazon Prime: buying DVD / Bluray and ripping to my home media server with Jellyfin and Videoland.nl
    • Mobile Phone: Fairphone with /e/OS or Calyx
    • Whatsapp: Signal, Matrix / Element, Briar, Threema
    • YouTube: Grayjay, Floatplane, Nebula, Curiosity Stream
    • Maps: Magic Earth
    • Photos: ente.io
    • Authenticator: Ente Auth
    • Twitter / X: Mastodon
    • Cards: Catima
    • Keep / Evernote: Notesnook / Anytype
    • Backup comms: Meshtastic / UHF / VHF
    • Translate: DeepL
    • Podcasts: Antennapod
    • Google Home: Home Assistant
    • Google Assistant / Gemini: Mistral Le Chat / LLama
    • Router: openWRT (GL.iNET Flint2)
    • Firewall: opnSense (Deciso)
    • Pushbullet: KDE Connect
    • speedtest.net: LibreSpeed
    • Fing: Ning
    • Kobo / Kindle: Pocketbook
    • Amazon: Local / European dealers
    • Pocket: Wallabag
    • Creality / Bambulab: Prusa
    • VPN: Proton, Wireguard, Tailscale
  •  /home/pineapplelover   ( @pineapplelover@lemm.ee ) 
    4•6 days ago

    Google office stuff > libreoffice

    Chrome > firefox and librewolf

    gmail > proton

    Google > ddg

    Iphone > grapheneos pixel

    Youtube account > newpipe, libretube, grayjay with exported subscriptions

    Google drive > synology

    I think that covers about everything google specific.

    Note: I included iphone because even iphones ping google SUPL servers whereas Grapheneos settings host their own servers to ping to avoid sending stuff out to google.

  •  murky0106   ( @murky0106@lemm.ee ) English
    3•5 days ago

    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
  •  Frenchys_prospecting   ( @Frenchys_prospecting@aussie.zone ) English
    3•6 days ago

    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

  •  UltraMasculine   ( @UltraMasculine@sopuli.xyz ) 
    3•6 days ago

    If I remember correctly I started deGoogling “seriously” in the last summer. At this point YouTube and Youtube Music are the only Google products/services I still use daily but only on PC. I never use them on phone. I also am quite forced to use Gmail sometimes but otherwise I avoid it like a plague.

    I think my phone is as deGoogled as possible without rooting and/or changing the OS. I have uninstalled every Google app that I have been able to uninstall and also I have disabled every Google service that is possible to disable. I still have to deMicrosoft my PC. I want to move to Linux but I have understood that there’s some compatibility issues with Reaper and virtual instruments. That’s the only reason I haven’t done it yet.

    Anyway. Here is a list of apps/services I use instead of Google’s sh*t:

    • Browser: Waterfox on PC and Ironfox on phone (of course both with uBlock Origin)
    • Cloud storage: Proton Drive
    • Email: Proton Mail
    • Calendar: Proton Calendar
    • Authenticator: Aegis
    • Map: OsmAnd
    • Search engine: DuckDuckGo and Brave Search
    • Play Store: Droid-ify and Aurora Store (not signed in)
    • Speech Recognition & Synthesis: SherpaTTS
    • Find My Device: FindMyDevice (FOSS)

    I think that’s all. There’s some other FOSS apps and services that I use but they are not exactly replacements for Google’s sh*t.

  •  Noxy   ( @noxypaws@pawb.social ) English
    1•5 days ago

    Search: Kagi (paid)

    Email and calendar: Tuta (paid)

    Synced storage (like Dropbox): Synology Drive (free, used with my Synology NAS)

    Photos: Synology Photos (free, used with NAS)

    Passwords: Bitwarden (paid)

    Music subscription: Tidal

    Music purchases: Qobuz and Bandcamp

    No complaints about any of these. Quite happy having de-googled and de-appled.

  •  octochamp   ( @octochamp@lemmy.ml ) 
    1•4 days ago

    Email

    • Proton Mail, (paid) I switched 7 years ago and it’s great, I’ve never looked back. I don’t use the attached services like calendar and contacts because it’s a little bit too walled-off for the integrations I need, but I do use ProtonVPN and Drive.
    • Thunderbird (free) on desktop, to access my IMAP or exchange email addresses (work etc) along with Proton Bridge so I never touch the Proton web app. On Android, I use Thunderbird for the IMAP addresses plus the Proton app, which isn’t ideal but not sure what the alternative could be.

    Calendar and contacts

    • Nextcloud (free) installed on the basic shared hosting for my personal website manages all my contacts
    • Etesync (free) is currently syncing my calendars, but I’m planning to swap this soon to the Nextcloud instance just to simplify things.

    Notes / Resource management

    • Anytype (free) is incredible and I now run my life off of it. Took months to really get the hang of it but it’s worth the effort.

    Cloud storage

    • Proton Drive (paid) is great, I use it for all my work applications, sending to clients etc and sync my most important files, but only have 500gb storage so
    • Synology Drive (free) installed on the NAS I use for backups covers all my personal uses, including photo backups.

    Browser

    • Firefox (of course), with uBlock Origin (of course)

    Search

    • DuckDuckGo (free), I ran Kagi for a while but the company seems shady and the price is extremely high for what you get

    Passwords

    • 1Password (paid), migrated after the LastPass incident and before ProtonPass existed. It would make sense to save the money and switch to Proton but tbh 1Password has been great and I wouldn’t risk the faff.

    Documents

    • Honestly I don’t have a lot of need for Google Docs replacements but when I do need to work on docs I’ll use LibreOffice. If it needs to be shared I’d probably do a public share on Anytype, or use Proton Docs. More likely, someone else will have invited me to a Google doc and I’ll have to sign in to use it.

    Audio

    • PocketCasts (paid) is a great service. I also use Spotify (sorry, all my friends use it)

    RSS

    • FreshRSS also set up on my web hosting so I get all my news/articles/substacks etc through ReadYou and Fluent Reader.

    Google products I still use

    • Maps
    • YouTube (with uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock on both desktop and android), I just sadly can’t let go of my carefully crafted algorithm oops
  •  LinkOpensChest.wav   ( @LinkOpensChest_wav@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 
    7•7 days ago

    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.

    •  jlow (he/him)   ( @jlow@beehaw.org ) 
      3•7 days ago

      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).

      •  LinkOpensChest.wav   ( @LinkOpensChest_wav@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 
        3•7 days ago

        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.)

    •  letsgo   ( @letsgo@lemm.ee ) English
      2•6 days ago

      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.

      •  LinkOpensChest.wav   ( @LinkOpensChest_wav@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 
        1•6 days ago

        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.

  •  Lettuce eat lettuce   ( @Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml ) 
    4•7 days ago

    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.

  •  somenonewho   ( @somenonewho@feddit.org ) 
    4•6 days ago

    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

      •  somenonewho   ( @somenonewho@feddit.org ) 
        4•6 days ago

        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

  •  The_Caretaker   ( @The_Caretaker@lemm.ee ) English
    3•7 days ago

    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.

    •  Lyra_Lycan   ( @Lyra_Lycan@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) English
      1•6 days ago

      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.