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?
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
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.
Proton CEO endorsed Trump
This is a blatant lie. That never happened.
- 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, Netbird
for speedtest, fast.com is pretty great as it’s a pretty lightweight page and uses netflix’s servers which mean it’s not really possible for ISPs to game it
Vivaldi is google
Wow OK! I didn’t know about Infomaniak kSuite, thank you. Looks great!
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.
deleted by creator
Yeah Tubular is basically NewPipe with Sponsorblock. I’ll give Freetube a try.
What I mean though is … it’s still YouTube, y’know?
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 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.)
I’m pretty sure Osmand centers the map in North Is Up mode but I’m not 100% certain.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh last time I tried it didn’t synch listening history just subscriptions. I’ll have to give it another go one of these days, thanks
I use Antennapod too, I really like it :)
I fucked off Google Photos and now run Immich from a Raspberry Pi with raid 1 SSDs.
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
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 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.
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
-
deleted by creator
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.
deleted by creator
On your PC, freetube will work as a Youtube frontend, you can point it to an invidious instance to act proxy to youtube if you like.
deleted by creator
Be warned, moving your subscriptions over is a bit of a pain in the as since you have to use Google takeout to download a json list if all your subs, otherwise it’s solid and smooth, comes with sponsorblock built in
Mail: Posteo Maps: osmand for walking, hiking, cycling, skiing and magic earth for car navigation (because of real live traffic) Drive: nextcloud Phone: second Hand Google pixel with graphene OS installed (degiogled Android)
There are like 10 communities called something like privacy and a couple with degoogle in their name specifically. If you need more alternatives check them out. ;)
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.
I guess I’ll share my setup aha. Forewarning: I invested heavily into self hosting and being in full control of as much as possible, mainly to try to be ‘Internet independent’.
- Google ads, APIs, telemetry and everything else that is not necessary: AdGuard Home (selfhosted)
- Android app store: Fdroid with IzzyOnDroid repo, failing that Aurora Store, if apps still whine about not being to use Play Services then I use the Play Store
- Gmail: Mailcow Dockerized (selfhosted) with K9 Android client
- SMS (not that I use it anyway): Fossify SMS
- Instant messaging: Matrix (selfhosted) for Discord/Telegram style with Element client, or Telegram FOSS
- File Manager (I goddamn hate that Google Files forces itself onto any phone after initial setup, even when there’s a manufacturer installed one already): Material Files
- GBoard (It’s also really fucking invasive): HeliBoard
- YouTube: via Revanced Manager, with Odysee as a hopeful replacement. Much lower userbase though, obviously.
- Google Photos (refuses to settle for less than 100% file access): Part of a self hosted Samba share that I keep synced to via FolderSync (from Play Store - they charge €10 for the app outside of Google)
- Chrome: Brave (I downloaded a script to debloat it of crypto and AI)
- Google Search: My partner uses Ecosia for environment reasons, and I use DuckDuckGo for privacy reasons
- Chromecast: I recommend a Roku
- AndroidOS: CalyxOS if Pixel, LineageOS if not
- Play Services: Gapps pico or nano because some things are still tied to Play Services
- Maps is superior, unfortunately, but OSMAnd is a good alt
- Google DNS, used by default by a lot of things like routers: Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1
Brave is chrome
deleted by creator
I definitely understand their sentiment though - Google is obviously a search engine monopoly, and I simply found Chromium to be better suited to my needs than Firefox, and settled for a modified Chromium base.
I use Ad Nauseum. Why degoogle when you can actively cost them money?
What’s Ad Nauseum? What does it do and why do you like it?
It seems interesting
