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?
Tried? That is boring. Stick with what we kept using.
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.
Chrome ➡️ Brave - Open source and privacy focused
Search ➡️ Qwant - Good search results and privacy focusing
Photos ➡️ Immich - Pretty much Google Photos but self hosted
Drive ➡️ Nextcloud - Use it with Hetzner Storage Share, pretty cheap and easy to use
Gmail ➡️ mailbox.org - European email hosting focusing on privacy
Meet ➡️ Nextcloud
Brave is google
No. Brave builds on top of the Chromium engine which is from Google but open source.
So, it depends on google
No it doesn’t. If Google stops supporting it, the community forks it and continues development. Has happened often in the past.
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.
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.
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.
Was out of the loop on that so I just did the most cursory search. What do you think of this take on it?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Been degoogled for years at this point:
- Stock Android --> LineageOS or GrapheneOS (no gapps)
- YouTube --> Invidious*, NewPipe
- Google Search --> DuckDuckGo, Brave Search
- Google Play Store --> F-Droid, Aurora Store
I’ve also decoupled from other similar services:
- Outlook --> ProtonMail
- Calendar --> Nextcloud*
- OneDrive --> Nextcloud*
- Windows, macOS --> Linux (after years of distrohopping, I found LMDE is incredibly stable while still being a nice “out of box” distro)
- Google Maps, Apple Maps --> OSMAnd, Organic Maps
I never used any online password manager myself, I went from writing passwords in a literal book to KeePass, to now Vaultwarden* for that
* - self hosted
Nice, I have also chosen most of the same as you. For custom ROM there’s CalyxOS, which ironically makes a Pixel phone one of the best picks for deGoogleing
I don’t like the proprietary style of Proton Mail, plus they charge to have more than one account logged in, which is very inconvenient, so I set up my own Mailcow instanceFor YouTube I highly recommend ReVanced
For notes I use Apache-CouchDB and connect using Obsidian with the LiveSync plugin. Live sync is fantastic and is as close as I think I’ll ever get to OneNote.
NextCloud is great, a pain in the arse to add existing files as you need to upload everything, but a few hours of uploading with Cloudflare set to DNS only is fine
I’ve considered CalyxOS but prefer the hardening of GrapheneOS with no gapps - still means a phone decent on privacy. However I do try to keep an open mind, so if CalyxOS has additional privacy benefits to my existing setup I’d be interested.
I agree with the proprietary style of ProtonMail point, and my workaround for multiple accounts has been to use my own domain and have email rules for delivering messages to the respective folder. I don’t have immediate plans to move from them, but I am watching the news cycle and have considered Tuta as an alternative.
I haven’t used ReVanced, but I remember the original YouTube Vanced was a mod of the original YouTube apk - if that’s still the case, I feel like ReVanced would offer even less privacy than Invidious or NewPipe. However I’m happy to be corrected.
I personally use Nextcloud notes but the Obsidian setup you have sounds interesting, especially if it’s like OneNote - I’ll keep it in mind!
Completely agree on your Nextcloud points - I uploaded my uncompressed Telegram archive to it, which took like 12 hours over my Gigabit lan. I suspect it hated the sheer amount of small files
You’re absolutely right about Revanced taking the official app and adding mods, I pretty much rely on being logged in for now but the NewPipe etc. alternatives are definitely a more secure option.
Obsidian actually has more features that I appreciate than OneNote! It not only has community plugins, meaning any dev can bang together a feature, but it specialises in workflow, linking notes together, adding tags, and the golden egg of the app is their Graph view. I used this repo as a guide to set it up, except for manually adding the livesync configuration in-app
chrome > firefox with ublock origin
and while nextcloud does replace drive, docs and photos, its buggy for some people. a decent alternative is syncthing.
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.
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.
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?
Thanks ♥️
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.
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.)
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.
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.
The problem with Google services is that they will be probably one of the last ones (from big tech companies) I will stop using. I wanted to switch to Proton this year, but there has been some controversy of its CEO supporting Trump…
Edit: Removed unrelated paragraph.
Google’s CEO literally showed up to Trump’s inauguration and pretty sure even paid millions or billions. So if you’re not using Proton because their CEO made a tweet supporting Trump, then Google should probably be one of the first companies that you must boycott, in my opinion.
Was out of the loop on that so I just did the most cursory search. What do you think of this take on it?
https://cartes.app/ is a new kid on the block to replaces Gmaps, looks very cool bit is also very alpha atm. But I’ll keep checking it, it has some very cool features already (French only atm which I don’t speak at all but it’s still super usable.)
I have moved away from Google Contacts and Google Calendar and am now using Synology Calendar/Contacts. I’ve left Google Drive for Synology Drive and I’ve left Google Photos for Synology Photos. Everything is self hosted and self maintained.
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. ;)
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 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
