I moved away from Google a few years ago. I'm using the following alternatives:

- Email: ProtonMail

- Contacts, Calendar, Online storage: NextCloud hosted by Hetzner (https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share)

- Phone: LineageOS (Android)

-- App stores: F-Droid for most apps and Aurora store for the occasional non F-Droid apps (like the ProtonMail client)

-- Maps: MagicEarth (not open source but privacy friendly and very featureful)

-- Messaging: Telegram FOSS

-- Contact & Calendar sync: DAVx

- Notes: Joplin (syncs with NextCloud and available on F-Droid as well)

- Search: DuckDuckGo

ProntonMail (with own domain) and the hosted NextCloud instance aren't free, but privacy comes with a price and I'm happy to pay for it. So far I'm very happy with the transition.

For anyone who wants to give LineageOS a try but can't/won't figure out how to jailbreak your phone to install it, check out https://privatephoneshop.com/

They have a decent selection of relatively modern phones. They will sell you a phone with LineageOS and microG pre-installed ( CalyxOS or GrapheneOS also ). They offer a super smooth buying experience and they are also quick to ship.

I've purchased two phones from them and both have exceeded my expectations. Another reason I like them is because the owners put out a lot of excellent content on keeping good privacy practices and combating invasive advertising.

My only complaint is that I wish they offered more phone models. It's a small thing though. I'm just happy they're available in the USA where it's becoming nearly impossible to purchase a smartphone that doesn't have a carrier-enforced restriction on flashing the bootloader.

An alernative to Magic Earth would be Organic Maps. https://organicmaps.app/

Though it's not as focused on driving, it seems. But may be good enough.

I use both as I find the trails on Organic Maps easier to follow, while Magic Earth works better in cities. This is with the default map types. There might be a setting I could toggle to give me the best of both in one app.

I haven't seen much mention of Maps.Me, but it's another OSM-based android app I've heard good things about from Europeans and enjoyed while traveling in South America.

I haven't tried it much in the US.

Organic Maps is a fork of maps.me that was started after maps.me got bought.

The US should be pretty good for trails, reasonable for streets and highly variable for addresses and POIs.

Organic Maps is the "original" maps.me. Though highly rated, maps.me changed ownership a few times and in between had removed lot of the original features. I believe at that time the original developers of maps.me launched Organic Maps, even though the changes mentioned above have now been reversed.

One advantage of Organic Maps is that it integrates well with OpenStreetMap. As I live in a place where OSM coverage is pretty average, I have fun adding places I know through this application and make small contributions in my own way. It also does not collect any user data. Give it a try.

These apps are pretty much not useable in rest of the world.

OpenStreetMap data is probably the best geographic data you’ll find all around the world. Which region are you speaking about?

India.

Honest question: Is Google Maps much better than OpenStreetMap in India?

I have the luxury to live in central Europe, and here both are much, much closer in amount of detail.

ProtonMail has abysmally small storage space if you receive attachments in mail frequently.

Fastmail is much cheaper if you need many gigs of storage, but you don't get the encryption Proton offers.

On the upside, Fastmail is the one e-mail service that I have tested that is actually more comfortable to use than Gmail. How they manage to incorporate practically every feature I could dream of while offering a totally neat, snappy, intuitive interface across platforms is just impressive. (Testing right now and planning to move there from Gmail.)

Proton looks really neat too, I just don’t like the thought of not having platform-independent IMAP access. It’s certainly a sensible tradeoff for more security-minded folks though.

I switched from Gmail to Fastmail years ago (it only takes a few minutes of you own your domain) and whenever I have to use Gmail (for work) it seems slow and bloated.

Fastmail is very quick to load and user-friendly, I don't miss Gmail at all.

Indeed, I have wanted to switch away from Gmail for a long time, especially because of the stories of randomly terminated accounts, but the straw that broke the camel's back was that Gmail somehow managed to break the compose window: when I select/replace/delete text using the keyboard or do undo/redo, sometimes there are weird glitches that creep me out.

I don't care that they haven't added meaningful new features in a long time, I don't care that they rearrange the UI every now and then, but breaking core functionality for no tangible reason is just unacceptable.

I switched to Gmail in 2008 because they cared about auto-saving drafts while other webmail just lost drafts when the session had expired and I clicked "send". Nowadays, I guess they mostly care about Material Design and streering me towards their latest clusterf**k of a chat/conference app.

I switched from Gmail to Fastmail a few months ago and it’s been great. Don’t miss Gmail at all.

And the Fastmail mobile apps are better than the Gmail mobile apps. Way better. It's crazy.

am interested, elaborate

Fastmail doesn’t allow custom domains on it’s first tier paid plan, does it?

$50 per year - custom domain, 30GB

$30 per year - no custom domain, no IMAP, 2GB (yes, 2GB!)

That’s some pricing!

The last thing you want is use an email that’s paid and not on your domain! Fastmail’s Basic paid plan is absurd not only price/feature wise, it’s useless just for not letting custom domain use.

I would rather stick to alternatives.

$30 / 12 = $2.5

I had the same idea when I first learned of them (and price was even lower) but after doing the same math it occured to me what:

a) they DO have clients who are happy to use their domains (and they have a lot of them)

b) ~$4/m is absurdingly cheap for the service they provide.

c) it is the casual "we prefer what you pay us $N, but if you insist there is a cheaper alternative (with some restrictions) for $M"

And finally, I checked my plan and I'm still on Business Lite, $20/y ($1.66/m) and 750MB of storage. Sure, each couple of years I go in and cull the old irrelevant messages, but even with a bunch of messages from providers up from 2014 I still use only 372MB, 50% of my message box.

Sure, I'm not using it a lot for a correspondence with an actual people, but I'm pretty fine with it, particulary because I like what I don't have 9999+ notifications from social networks about someone's birthdays etc.

I initially bought the Fastmail $50 plan for personal and a 2nd for business. After getting everything transferred from Gmail, I realized that I only had 3GB of email stored at Google after over 10 years, and most of that I never looked at. So as an experiment, I converted the personal account back to a $30 account with the 2GB limit. My focus is on keeping my Inbox nearly empty except for actually pending things. FM says my storage is 6% full and I'm using 0.1GB of 2GB, but even that is just trash. I have the Trash folder set to autopurge email after 1 year and think I won't ever run out of space. And if I do, I can just delete the trash earlier.

For me this isn't about the $20, but more about making do with less. If I had a higher quota, the only thing it would allow me to do is accumulate more trash email! I do agree with you though that for $30/yr, they should allow custom domains.

Yeah, the $30 plan doesn't meet my needs for the same reasons. I don't mind paying $50 though so it's not a problem.

I'm really happy with fastmail. Anything sent to anything@anything.mydomain goes in my inbox, and I can apply filtering based on those. It also lets me generate @fastmail.com emails if I don't want to expose my domain. It also scrapes my ~5 old gmail addresses and copies those emails into my inbox. It's awesome.

ProtonMail is just PGP, nothing special about it.

While Proton is a common recommendation and I do use their VPN which is good, I would also urge people to look at alternative providers. This is a decent list.

https://www.fsf.org/resources/webmail-systems

I switched from Gmail to Posteo when I came across this link. While the interface is really basic, it works for me and it also helps me support smaller businesses.

If you are using ProtonMail, you might want to check out their Proton Calendar. Still waiting for Proton Drive (beta) apps to see if it might partially replace Google Drive or Dropbox.

I've been looking at their other services but for now I'm happy using NextCloud, which provides more than just calendar and file storage. I also have phone tracking (so I can send my real time location to my relatives when driving and visualize the places I've been) and an RSS aggregator. Additionally, I'm not locking myself into another service provider. I'm still open to the idea of moving to another e-mail provider some day even though I'm happy with ProtonMail's service so far.

-- Search: DuckDuckGo They've become more and more bolitically biased and I'd recommend to move away even from them. There are searx and MetaGer.

-- Messaging: how about Conversations? It's pretty out-of-the-boxy. But I have to admit, no working voice calls.

You must have learned a lot of things that might prove useful to other people who might want to do the same transition.

I for sure would love to read a full length article about it.

It was quite a roller coaster to move to alternative services, and also giving up on all social media. But after a while you get used to things and find handy alternatives (like MagicEarth for maps, this app is great!). It feels liberating and I'm more at peace knowing I'm in control of my data. I keep reading these anxiety inducing Google account terminations for years, they also motivated my move (in addition to the privacy benefits). Sure, this could happen to me to with the service providers I use, but at least they have human point of contacts and all my data is backed up and ready to move to another services.

I'm definitely up to share my experience and write a full article about this. Hopefully in the coming month when I find some time :-)

I moved to DuckDuckGo as my default search engine in the past couple of weeks but a few days ago, I had gone back to google search because the search results are much better. I really wanted to move away from google but the service is just much greater compared to the alternatives.

I had the opposite experience.

Google was returning what I wanted, not what I needed.

DuckDuckGo isn't trustable either. The only benefit to using them is just changing google's market share at your own expense

You guys should try Brave Search (I'm not affiliated, just a user). If you like the speed of Chromium and the Blink engine, but you're dissatisfied with the Firefox/DDG combination, it's particularly good.

Organic Maps is good, especially if you like hiking, and is on F-Droid

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/app.organicmaps/

Any particular reason to avoid OpenStreetMaps? Vs MagicEarth

I haven't tested MagicEarth, but never have I spent as much time miserably lost as when I spent a very determined month trying to use OSMAnd+ (the main AOSP OSM client, at least as far as I knew at the time?).

It's dreadful at driving directions, and it's not like I live somewhere weird. It was getting me lost even in a town with a 30k+ student state university.

MagicEarth is based on OSM and their navigation is great, both for driving and walking (haven't tried cycling). I even got better routes suggested when driving vs Google Maps (I compared with a friend using GMaps, he switched to MagicEarth after that :-) ). The only time it messed up was by suggesting a non-existent walking path down a hill in Kiev, which resulted in me rolling down and slicing my arm open, nothing to serious though. Overall I'm happy enough with it to not spend more time looking for other alternatives. If anyone has a better alternative, I'm always listening.

I'm not sure openstreetmaps has a good driving experience?

I've been using Magic Earth for several years, its getting better and better.

Its closed source, but privacy orientated apparently.

and has anyone inspected what they both do on Wireshark etc?

ProtonMail's UI is way too slow and bloated. Their privacy values are dubious and generally more expensive. I've been using FastMail is fantastic.

old.protonmail.com is the way to go with ProtonMail's UI. Their new UI is a mess and not configurable. In old. you get a place to write your own CSS to configure the UI as you see fit.

Not sure if you do it for privacy, ethical or practical reasons, but here's my journey: I removed my life from Big Tech (FB, TW, Gmail, YT, G Drive, MS, and other anti-user/spyware/malware companies). It was surprisingly easy to do and refreshing spiritually.

First, philosophy: this article resonated so much with me that I made the brave step of deleting my big tech accounts and switching to Linux: https://medium.com/hackernoon/leaving-apple-and-google-my-ee...

Then, execution. This site will help you to find user-friendly alternatives to your spyware apps/OSs/services: https://www.privacytools.io/

I am now with a setup that maximizes privacy and giving money to ethical companies: Phone OS: LineageOS and /e/ Desktop/Laptop: Debian and Linux Mint Browser Mobile: Bromite Browser Desktop: LibreWolf (firefox fork oriented to privacy) Maps and GPS mobile: OsmAnd Mobile app store: F-Droid, Aurora Store Search Engine: DuckduckGo, SearX Email: Posteo (1€/month) VPN: Mullvad (5€/month) Online drive: NextCloud-based service ie /e/ foundation

Once I researched the above and checked the companies/projects are trustworthy, I started using them with surprisingly low bumps in the road. For mobile OS I went radical and didn't even install microG (a package to enable G services so some apps work well). I still can use my favorite apps, including banking (although if you root your phone you might have issues)

The active maintainers of privacytools.io 'recently' split up into a new more community-focused site due to inactivity of the founder. https://privacyguides.org/

Read more here: - https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivacyGuides/comments/pnhn4a/rpriv... - https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivacyGuides/comments/pnh9n8/what_...

Thanks for the update! I was not aware of the situation and just joined the new community. I like the way they start the new page by suggesting users to create a threat model. My threat model is almost zero (I don't do anything interesting that deserves surveillance) so to me, it's a matter of principle. I rather pay 1€/month rather than having Google scannning my personal emails. I rather donate to Linux Mint rather than having Microsoft monetize my desktop experience with crapware and ads.

Good for you for voting with your wallet and being conscious of which causes your money supports.

I was confused what /e/ was; it's https://e.foundation/

Fastmail for email.

I used to use syncthing to maintain backups and syncing, but eventually just gave into iCloud as a compromise. Setting up and maintaining syncthing on wife and kids devices became a pain.

DuckDuckGo for search. Dropping down to google when I’m stuck. Honestly I’ve found google worse for technical topics due to all the junk websites that recycle content.

You’ll be fighting against the current trying to ditch google with an android phone! I’m sure it’s possible though.

A great benefit of de googling (and also dropping most social media) is that I am barely exposed to ads at all! It’s is shocking using other peoples devices now ahah.

I really want to like ddg but it's just awful - not only are the results completely irrelevant but now it's started showing me russian language results, I'm in a country that uses the Latin alphabet.

Google is catching them on the way down in my experience these days. I'm doing less and less !g, not because I like the DDG results, but because I'm just not confident in Google showing me anything useful either.

This might be just a consequence of cutting the feed of data into Google to personalise from other sources, though. Perhaps people who've thought they've been equivalent for a longer period were ahead of me on that one.

How strange, I've been using DDG for a few years now and only rarely do I need to go to Google. Do you have examples of searches where Google is definitely superior (just out of curiosity, not challenging the notion)?

Can't recall a particular one at the moment but pretty obvious searches return results that aren't really relevant enough, maybe I just need to change my query language though, but exact matches really should just work

Recent one from me: "Hibernate window function"

Google showed results that explain Hibernate's expression language isn't sufficient to express them and explainers on how to drop down to native queries.

DDG showed me how to hibernate my windows PC.

I tried the same test, in a clean browser that should have nothing for Google to grab (beyond IP address) to correlate with my browsing habits. Of the top 10 results, Google got the right context in 7, while DDG got it in only one (the 10th in fact). I guess if you work with that particular piece of software, maybe you hit this sort of thing a lot. Thankfully, my experience is more like GP's: I only rarely try sending queries to Google, and for me at least, often those rare cases don't yield anything from Google beyond the realization that I need to figure out a better query.

Yeah, enterprise java tech in general (not just hibernate) seems to be some of the worst. There's enough terminology collision and incentive for blogspam with the number of corporate users, but not enough interest in people using it for personal reason to have high quality blogs, and core pieces of it (Hibernate, Spring, Jackson for example) have shockingly poorly organised documentation.

i also checked bing, and it's the same as DDG, but if you add "SQL" to your search query they turn up a lot of the same stuff as google. Since my goal is getting rid of Google, and it's the first thing I thought to do, it works fine for me

For me, it’s sports schedules and scores. If I type MLS or NHL into Google, I get a schedule with todays games, standings, etc. DDG simply provides search results.

It’s honestly the only thing I still use Google for at this point.

That matches my experience. DDG is only useful if I'm typing in English. If I type in my native language then DDG thinks it's Spanish and shows me a bunch of crap I can't read.

> I really want to like ddg but it's just awful

I use duckduckgo almost exlusively and I don't have any trouble finding what I'm looking for

Just use !g on your query whenever you wanna go to actually use google. Don't trade slightly better search for censorship and privacy invasion.

I just recently started seeing these results too, particularly when doing foreign (latin) non english searches.

I thought at first it was russians talking about hacking foreign banks, supermarkets etc. Then i started noticing links about doctors, etc and i realized something is off.

This is a very recent development. I'll prob have to drop ddg for something else...

Been using DDG for years now, rarely ever have trouble. I mean, sometimes there is a tough query - but the cases where Google is more useful now measure in "less than once a couple of months". Non-English is a bit tougher, I guess - I mostly search in English these days.

I think though, the irrelevancy of results is worse as sometimes the Cyrillic results make sense once translated

try brave search

Well I am a native English speaker but in a Slavic country so I'd expect some results, but they're not they seem to assume russian which means Cyrillic which I cannot read

I use Fastmail for email, contacts, calendar, reminders, and notes. I have been an extremely happy customer for several years and I am happy to promote them. I don't think I've ever used another web-based service that has such a high "usefulness/power : annoyance : money spent" ratio.

I use paid Seafile hosting for file sync. I haven't tried Syncthing, but the Seafile clients all seem to work very smoothly.

You can install /e/os on a lot of android phones. I've been happy with it. https://e.foundation/

DDG is starting to have some real competition. Kagi is quite good if you can score an invite (still closed beta), and it has DDG-compatible !bang syntax so transitioning is effortless.

you.com has the same bangs and is open to everyone :)

Looks like it is manipulated similarly as google. Searched images of "white couple" shows mostly mixed couples.

I thought I'll be the last to move from Google because I'm alright with them using all my private data. But now I'm line to find an alternative: they've just locked our payment profile for an app with 25k+ positive ratings and their support does literally nothing to help us. I've just started a thread, maybe someone has the same experience and can share their experience https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30861147

Not sure if you like Microsoft any better but after over a decade of Gmail I’ve moved back to outlook and prefer it. It’s a lot better than it used to be. One Drive is much better than GDrive, and MS’s office programs have always been significantly better IMO. I find the whole Microsoft suite to be affordable and enjoyable to use. Obviously iPhone is an (or the) alternative to Android.

I still don’t find much better than Google for searching but I guess Bing and DDG are at least a lot better than nothing. I do feel like my user satisfaction with Google search goes down a little bit every year.

Depending on why you’re moving away from Google these may not be options you’ll consider. But if your opposition isn’t to big tech in particular but to just Google give MS products a try if you haven’t in awhile.

Yes, I use the outlook dot com ecosystem and recommend it for non-technical people on a budget. It has a free version of MS Word that's good enough to make resumes on if you have no other way.

At the other end of the scale, you get get a free Office365 enterprise license if you sign up to try out MS Graph Explorer. 90 days but they've renewed it a couple times now, you just have to log in and use it every once in a while.

Tip: If you have more than 1 MS account your computer starts to get confused. In chrome open a guest window to log in to different MS accounts.

I'm thinking about leaving Google land because I think their incentives are heavily misaligned with mine as a consumer.

Although Microsoft and Apple win points for not having ads their a primary profit mechanism, they unfortunately use the same strategy as Google: creating walled ecosystems that are very hard to leave. MS in particular has shown how aggressively anti-consumer they will be in the right conditions.

I was in this same situation a couple of years ago and easily managed to move to a comoletely Google-free life for 3€/month. I've documented it on my blog [0], but here's the summary:

- mail-in-a-box for email

- NextCloud (included in mail-in-a-box) for contacts, calendars, and files

- LineageOS for MicroG for Android

- OpenStreetMap for maps

- DuckDuckGo for search

- Firefox as internet browser

[0] https://blog.ideotec.es/leaving-google-foss-journey/

This has already been discussed extensively on HN in the past.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

We get these posts every 60 days like clockwork.

True, and unfortunate because it means it'll be harder to tell once a truly compelling and attractive alternative comes along.

The offerings in this space change so quickly and it results in these threads having a pretty short shelf life. Getting a super current solution to arguably one of the greatest privacy problem facing our world right now is probably worth a little redundancy and clutter. Right?

but the dark pattern methodology for extricating oneself from google also changes so there's nothing wrong with refreshing the topic

I'm still looking for an alternative e-mail provider that is more privacy-conscious than Google, still works with ordinary IMAP and is based in the EU so I get to actually benefit from EU data protection. Haven't found one that ticks all boxes yet, but going with a US company doesn't appear to change much as I'm not a US citizen and hence fair game once my data is on US servers and I guess it inevitably will end up there, and encryption schemes that won't work with IMAP are too cumbersome (I tried); ideally they also have contacts and calendar that work with the iOS/macOS apps. Would love to de-google at least email on the domain I own but it's not as easy as I'd expected.

What about https://mailbox.org/? I

I tried them in 2019, they did (and do, I guess) check all my boxes but it seemed they were moving fast and breaking stuff and IMAP/SMTP in Apple Mail was one of the broken things. Docs were very much out of date, IMAP kept erroring out every few attempts and SMTP never worked at all (their support people couldn't help either IIRC). IMAP/SMTP is a basic requirement for a not-E2E-email provider so that didn't instill much trust. Are they doing better nowadays?

FWIW, I'm a happy customer of https://mailbox.org for more than a year now. I know several other users who are also happy with them.

It's a no-frills, secure setup for a decent price. I definitely recommend mailbox.org.

I've been using IMAP with mbsync and gnus for probably over a year now and I've not had a single issue with it. I'm not the most prolific emailer, mind you.

I've created a trial account and they really have tidied up that part of the experience, they offer a downloadable profile for macOS that will set up Apple Mail, that's really neat and something I haven't seen with other providers yet. Will give them an in-depth check, this looks promising.

I recently moved all emails on personal domains to Cloudflare Email Routing [1]. It works flawlessly and you can setup ProtonMail or whatever other email you want as your private address that everything gets forwarded to without having to reveal what the destination address is.

For sending email, I setup an SMTP relay via Amazon SES. If you verify your domain, you can send an email from any alias.

This combination works great!

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/email-routing-open-beta/

That's a lot of moving parts, I don't think I'm comfortable juggling cloud infrastructure across three vendors just for e-mail. Also, I guess being US corporations AWS and Cloudflare still have to hand over any data a US agency requests.

Regarding SES, beware they force a Message-ID header, preventing at least forwarding of mail without breaking threads. There are probably more gotchas to this I hadn't discovered.

Have a look at Opalstack [1]. They are a hosting platform for developers, and their tools include DNS hosting and email hosting. You can have your email hosted and routed in Germany. I use them for myself and about a dozen clients of mine.

[1] https://docs.opalstack.com/user-guide/email/

I'll add Migadu to the existing suggestions ;^)

Did not know them, will check them out!

Don't know which providers you have considered, but one that many around me use is posteo.de. Or gandi.net (based in France).

Posteo can't do custom domains (I mentioned near the end of my comment I own one that I'd like to keep using)

Will check out gandi.net though!

I know you said based in the EU and Fastmail are based in Australia I think, but they are great. Integrates easily with email, calendar, and contacts clients using imap/caldav/carddav.

What makes you consider google to be privacy conscious? Aren't they just scanning your emails 24/7 to profile you for advertising?

I'd recommend against Australian based - There are laws that state companies must be able to decrypt encrypted user data if required, and for a backdoor to be in place if they require access.

A "Data Disruption Warrant" allows them to add, copy, delete or modify your data. "Account Takeover Warrant" will remove your access to an account but still allow them full access

If I was going to send truly sensitive information I wouldn't use email anyway, or I would but with gpg encryption, so I'm not too worried about the fact that fastmail might allow some government agency access. What fastmail will offer is privacy from 3rd parties such as advertisers and data brokers.

There have been attempts by police where I live to exploit such setups as loopholes to request data from companies in foreign jurisdictions that they wouldn't be able to obtain from domestic ones, and since there is no "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine over here, such evidence has actually been admitted in court, or at the least used to enable parallel construction. Given that the Aussies are doubling down on their police state, I'd rather not expose myself to such shenanigans (and if my data ends up in some predictive policing data warehouse, I'd prefer if it was just one, not two).

As for advertisement surveillance, I'd have to take Fastmail's word, whereas with a domestic provider, there's the GDPR that is a lot harder to evade for them than for some Australian company.

> Fastmail are based in Australia

Like sibling said, doesn't Australia have a pretty bad track record with respect to data protection (especially data owned by foreigners?) If ease of use were the #1 priority I'd stick with Google, I've never had a single issue in over a decade with them.

> What makes you consider google to be privacy conscious?

I probably didn't make that clear enough, but I don't consider them that, hence why I'm looking for something more privacy-conscious than Google (ideally not just a little more but I'm willing to make some compromises if that means I can keep using iOS Mail and the like)

I don't think I suggested ease of use was the number 1 priority?

Who are you looking for privacy from? Unless you use gpg/pgp it doesn't matter who you are using for email hosting, a state actor will get in. (Btw, proton etc are all pointless unless you only ever plan to email fellow proton users)

So then we are left with privacy from commercial 3rd parties. And I trust fastmail to offer me that, given that their customers pay for the service, I don't think it is worth it for them to also sell my data.

I believe Disroot is out of the EU and offers free (donation based) email services: https://disroot.org

I wasn't aware of them, will check them out. Thanks for the pointer!

I think they don't support bringing my own domain for privacy reasons [1]; as I mentioned near the end of my comment, I own a domain that I'd like to keep using for email, I use Google Workspace for this and lots of people and companies have that address, so switching to @posteo.de would be a waste of a neat vanity domain and a huge hassle. I probably could build something using Cloudflare and AWS as a sibling of your comment mentioned, but that's a lot of moving parts I need to manage myself. I'd rather if email just worked and when it doesn't, there's support I can ping to have it fixed.

1: https://posteo.de/en/site/faq "Can I use Posteo with my own domain?"

Did you consider ProtonMail?

I think they don't have IMAP, only some kind of bridge application that won't work on mobile. I'm not willing two have two different email apps in parallel, so I guess they are out.

Try Posteo, privacy is at the center of their whole e-mail business.

zoho.eu is quite nice and a different entity than zoho.com

This is the first time I'm hearing this. Can you please elaborate? Thanks

This will get buried with the other comments, but I've done a good job getting away from Google:

Email: Tutanota Calendar: Tutanota Messaging: Signal Phone: GrapheneOS Maps: OsmAnd~ Apps: F-Droid or Aurora Store Mobile Browser: Vanadium (Chromium-based) Desktop Browser: Brave (Chromium-based) YouTube client: NewPipe

The last three are iffy as far as de-Google-img goes. I used Firefox for years but recently I find it unusable. Every year more websites are broken in Firefox and it never gets better despite bug reports. There also isn't really an alternative to YouTube's content unless the creator you follow also posts on Odysee.

Any suggestions around the super slow Tutanota clients? It takes sometimes like 20 seconds for it to load the list of emails. Doesn’t sound like a lot but it adds up.

Hi there, Tutanota team here. We noticed your comment and just wanted to ask what client/device you are using to look into this? Usually Tutanota loads much faster, but for some devices we can definitely improve. We are also currently working on offline mode. Once that is done loading time will much reduce!

Hi. iPhone 12, 13 pro and 14in MacBook Pro (m1 pro). Every time I open the app it shows me a “logging in” with an animated bar while loading. It would be acceptable if it took that time to pull new emails, but not to just look at the old stuff I have already retrieved.

I appreciate your quick response though, shows that you guys are on top of things.

Thanks for the feedback. Yes, this is exactly what offline mode will solve in a couple of weeks. Stay tuned!

I moved from Gmail to Posteo, Gdrive to Nextcloud, and Android to /e/ OS. I self-host Nextcloud and installed the mobile OS myself, but if someone is not inclined, both have ready to use offerings as well.

Nextcloud partnered with providers and they give 2GB instances for free, allegedly. If you need more, you can check https://github.com/nextcloud/providers#providers

Buy an /e/ OS phone: https://esolutions.shop/

There are also third party sellers, like "Liberate your tech", who sell phones with GrapheneOS preinstalled.

Regarding their stability; Posteo is going strong since 2009, Nextcloud as a project 2010. For mobile devices I'd look at 3-5 year periods, and I feel confident that /e/ OS and GrapheneOS will be around for that time. Even if they don't, the situation is not that different from owning an Android that's not updated anymore, and also usually you can sell the phone on the used market and buy a new one that's still supported.

I've been a big fan of Fastmail for email and calendars. I've also thought about joining May First Co-op (https://mayfirst.coop/) as they've been around for a bit and offer a suite of services which includes email, chat, nextcloud for documents and files, etc.

I've also had good results with DDG for most things search. I know people say the results are worse, and on some occasions they are, but mostly it's perfectly serviceable in my experience.

For video conferencing I've been using a mix of Jitsi Meet and meet.coop (a big blue button instance that I have access to through my membership in social.coop, which is good for social media).

For chat (including phone calls and SMS through https://jmp.chat) I use https://conversations.im, the client costs money but the service just went free unless you want to use a custom domain.

My phone is running Lineage OS using F-Droid for an app store. I don't like F-Droid very much for reasons that don't matter here (that might have been fixed since the last time I looked into it for all I know), but it is a perfectly good alternative so I recommend it in the absence of anything better.

For maps I've been using Organic (https://organicmaps.app/). It uses Open Street map data so at first a lot of places I wanted to navigate to weren't there, but I added all the places I go regularly to the map and now it works pretty well.

I see a lot of recommendations for self hosted alternatives, either at home or a VPS/Rented server. While the HN crowd is probably better suited than most people, running a server connected to the internet is no small taks, and people should seriously consider other alternatives before doing so.

For some of the services, your own privacy measures may not matter one bit. Take email for example, you may self host it, or use a privacy oriented provider, but it doesn't help one bit if you recipient is on gmail or outlook, so one could argue that attempting to privacy secure email is in vain. You can of course use GPG, but that requires the receiver to publish keys, which not very many people do.

I've self hosted for a couple of decades, but some years ago i decided i no longer wanted to be our resident sysadm, and instead moved everything to the cloud. I went from a proxmox cluster and a couple of NAS boxes spinning at home, to nothing spinning, and no open ports in the firewall.

We now use regular cloud services (Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud, etc), and instead use Cryptomator (https://cryptomator.org/) to encrypt everything before sending it to the cloud.

For specific apps we use

- Joplin for notes (or just ios notes)

- Signal for messaging (though in reality we use quite a few clients, as it highly depends on what your recipient uses)

- MXRoute for mail / contacts

- DuckDuckGo for searching.

- Cryptomator on top of whatever cloud storage the individual prefers.

- Photos, here we chose the easy path, and simply use the integration offered by our phones, which in our case means iPhones, so iCloud.

> running a server connected to the internet is no small taks

Shared webhosting is still a thing and comes with the best of two worlds. Not expensive and professionals take care of the system under the hood.

https://app.skiff.org/ for E2EE Google Docs. Even has a direct integration to make the migration

Thanks for sharing! Happy to answer any questions.

The registration and login forms both appear to break Firefox password manager, even after applying a bookmarklet to remove relevant 'no autocomplete' HTML attributes. I just signed up, but chances are I won't be back after my clipboard gets overwritten

Looks great, congrats on the funding! What I couldn't make out from the website though is: can you export pages to pdf or other formats? Or share public links to them?

Just saw they raised their Series A. It seems like more and more players are entering the privacy space these days.

Self hosted email for 20 years so ignoring that:

- nextcloud for photos/drive - bitwarden with vaultwarden backend for passwords - self hosted Firefox Sync for everything else - syncthing for outlying file sharing - jottacloud for high capacity storage dump (rclone is your friend)

Probably forgot something

These are all great tools. But I wanted to gingerly hop on this thread to say that de google doesn’t have to mean self hosted.

I found it very rewarding to put my money towards companies that are aligned with my priorities (be it privacy or other) even if there were free alternatives.

Agreed. Fastmail is a great example. They are cheap, but their product is excellent and so is their support. I never have to worry about losing my account unless I stop paying. I got burned on that when I went to jail, but they offer a pre-pay option so you can now pay a decade worth of fees in advance :)

Yeah, I do use the odd service, email is just because I've always done that and I still like the flexibility

what are you using for self-host firefox sync?

The awful python 2 sync server still works for the most part, with storage bits and auth - it is a chore to setup and it sucks a little but eh, nobody else has bothered to make sync useful enough like the alternatives that do support custom sync need command line args which is not ideal and also rules out mobile devices entirely whereas Firefox on android has the ability to configure custom sync server for example

I use Fastmail for email and Dropbox for cloud storage. They're not going anywhere any time soon.

What's your point?

You posted a URL as if that was self-evident commentary.

A war criminal was hired to the board of Dropbox. You couldn't ascertain that in seconds?

Same

> I want to eventually move away, especially gmail and drive.

Run it yourself!

Get yourself a solid hosting company with shared webhosting. For Germany, hetzner or all-inkl would be my choice.

A hetzner "Level 1" shared webhosting for 1,90 €/month will come with an included TLD of your choice. Use that to host your own mailboxes. 10 GB webspace should be good for that, too.

Then install a NextCloud instance on that webhost. Add a hetzner "Storage Box", 3,45 €/month will give you 1 TB of space which can be mounted into the NextCloud through a free plugin.

That way you have mail and your own cloud for 5,50 €/month for as long as you pay the bill...

> Run it yourself!

I get where you're coming from. But, most people just simply don't have the appetite to run their own mail. What we need are: paid services that are reasonably reliable, secure, respect your privacy, and provide human-based customer support.

PS: I myself use Hetzner (for non-email stuff), and a hosted NextCloud service - both are great :)

Running your own mail is creating the mailbox and letting your mail client figure out how to connect to the server. There's not much work to do besides that. I think that's fine for anyone interested in becoming "independent" from services.

I think the fast answer, unfortunately, is going to Microsoft or Apple. They aren't going anywhere.

For personal use I'm happy with ProtonMail and F-Droid. For a calendar I use paper because I like being able to look at the wall and see the month, and to physically write things down. Same goes for note-taking, though that's a hybrid of digital and paper, with a goal of the important-er stuff going into the text files for easier searching (though like with paper books I have a sense where in each notebook certain things are). Good luck!

I wrote a bit about it at a blog post [0]. My idea is to substitute the "cloud" (i.e, your data and applications running on someone else's computers) for a "lake" of your own devices where you can replicate and synchronize the data, and use native free applications for each of the devices that you have.

So, for hardware

- Workstations: Linux

- Mobile: /e/OS [1]

For software:

- GDrive -> Syncthing for the documents, LibreOffice on workstations, simple document viewers on mobile

- Email: My own domain, service provided by namecheap, costs ~20€/year.

- Contacts, Calendar -> Syncthing to synchonize the files between the devices, and DecSync [2] as a calendar provider on thunderbird (workstation) and k-mail (mobile)

- App Store: F-Droid for most software, and the odd exception (Berlin ticket for public transportation) that is not F/OSS I use the /e/OS store (which proxies some of the apps from Google into their own store)

- Maps: MagicEarth (works well, uses OSM data, can do navigation decently and allows to choose download maps to keep offline). One of these days I will try again to self-host a tiling server, but I'm not sure what I would do for navigation.

- Messaging: Matrix/Element is my main client, I also have XMPP. Both are hosted by communick, the "professional managed service" that I run [3]. I also have Telegram (FOSS client) on mobile, but I've been meaning to implement the bridge on communick so that I can ditch the client. I use hangouts only on the computer if and only if the other party is not available on the preferred methods.

- Search: Brave search is working well. I preferred Brave over DDG because Brave is building their own index. If you think your queries are not giving you good results, you can turn on "Google mixing", where they make a (proxied) query to Google and show their results mixed with their own.

[0]: https://raphael.lullis.net/thinking-heads-are-not-in-the-clo...

[1]: https://e.foundation

[2]: https://github.com/39aldo39/DecSync

[3]: https://communick.com

Not to hijack the thread but in a similar vain: is anyone using an esolutions/murena degoogled phone as a daily driver? Thinking of getting their Fairphone version with /e/os but am unsure how it will handle common tasks (banking apps, navigation, camera, ...)?

ie. https://esolutions.shop/shop/murena-fairphone-4-fr/

I'm using the Fairphone 3 with /e/OS. Camera works fine. Navigation works with MagicEarth without any issues.

Banking Apps are a different story. At least my bank in Germany is not supporting non-Google phones yet. I'm keeping my previous phone (Nokia 6.1) around mostly for this reason.

I use Fastmail for my personal email and Outlook for my work email.

If you have any need to use Microsoft products for work or home (gaming), then it's worth getting an Office 365 subscription, since it also gives you a terabyte of space on OneDrive, which syncs pretty seamlessly on Windows.

You can de-Google a big chunk of your Android if you don't mind using Microsoft instead. Outlook for email, OneDrive for sync, Edge for browsing, OneNote for notes etc.

I deleted my Google account three years ago and haven't looked back.

Email was really the only thing I made heavy use of: Gandi, who I already pay to keep my domain registered, offers 3 GB mailboxes for free. This works fine for me since I archive and delete old mail annually. You can purchase 50 GB mailboxes for a few dollars per month.

For file storage, I host my own NextCloud instance and handle (offline, geographically redundant) backups myself. I also pay for a MEGA account and back up critically important documents there.

My primary phone runs Android 6 (terrible, I know) and I haven't had issues using it while not logged into a Google account. The artificially limited capacity of Google Maps' search history is a disappointing dark pattern, but that's about it. I plan on switching to a PinePhone eventually.

I do worry about the usability of newer Android versions without a Google account. Not sure what's changed, do you have to sign in to use current Android phones?

One question I've been asking myself about this migration, and didn't find all the solutions yet, is how to deal with services/websites/... I've logged into with a Google account. It's not always clear how, if even possible, to migrate from a Google SSO to a login/password.

Does anyone has thoughts on this?

I've had some success requesting password resets on services I signed up with Oauth to get a chance to set an actual password. Sometimes this seems to expose the internal account management, but it really depends.

At least once I've been able to do this by reaching out to customer support.

I use gmail as my backup e-mail and Google drive as one of three cloud storage services. I pay for GCP and YouTube ad-free and YouTube Music.

Great non-Google services I pay for are ProtonMail, Fastmail, iCloud, and Office-365.

I have played around with self-hosting options, but decided to just use Cloud services, but don’t rely on any single vendor.

Curious why both Protonmail and Fastmail?

How would you rate the two if one were to use just one of those?

Any experience with Zoho, if so would love your thoughts on that too..

I'm a Zoho One user and have generally been very happy with them. They have a guide[0] on how to move off the Legacy GSuite if that applies to you.

[0] https://www.zoho.com/mail/help/gsuite-to-zoho-mail-migration...

Zoho Email has been very reliable, spam protection has been satisfactory. Some minor things have bitten me, thier Zoom competitor only records audio, not video, the spreadsheets are sometimes slow to recalculate I trigger with F9 more than I'd like. But the workdrive has been on parity with GDrive, and the word Processor is more fully featured.

Zoho are very responsive for support and you do interact with a human. My "One" suite includes email, calendar, Gdocs competitor, Gdrive competitor, and also pretty much everything I need to run my small business (books, CRM, website, appointments, webinars, courses, etc..)

I like the idea of ProtonMail but FastMail is more convenient. I also tried Apple e-mail using my custom domain, and it was OK, but FM is a bit better.

"Pay for" current tense? Why are you using that many email services?

Maybe a bit contrarian but the best move might not be to move away for google unless the main driver is data privacy.

If you just don't want to risk being locked out its more important to keep access to your data these would be the steps:

- Get your own domain for email. If google locks you out you can just point it to somewhere else.

- Set google takeout to make monthly backups (automatically) of your email, photos and so on to google drive.

- Install desktop google drive on your computer. Set it to fully mirror all your files locally/offline. Then if google locks you out you will still have access to your files and photo/email backups. Bonus points for having a desktop mail app that keeps your email locally.

The lockout problem is not unique to google, can happen with most providers.

The issue with being locked out isn't just losing your data. It's also the fact that it's gonna likely cause a huge mess across all the accounts on other websites associated with that email account, if you're not locked out of them entirely.

If you use an email provider that lets you use your own custom domain, and use that as your primary email address on all of those sites and one day the provider decides to purge you off their site, the domain still belongs to you, so you can jump to a new service, point it at the same address, and all your internet accounts are none the wiser.

I switched to Tutanota for email and calendar and it has been surprisingly flawless.

To make the transition easier I started by forwarding all Gmail emails to Tutanota and I've been slowly updating my accounts to the new email. The plan is to eventually delete my Google accounts completely.

For e-mail, definitely check out https://mailbox.org. I've been a happy user of their service for more than a year now. Clean, secure, and effective. I'm not associated with them, but here is a decent review of it[1].

If you're comfortable with email clients, you can even use mailbox.org as a dumb mail-drop location and fetch everything locally via tools such as `mbsync`. Then you can use a mail client your choice (Thunderbird, Mutt, etc) to read/respond.

[1] https://proprivacy.com/email/review/mailboxorg

I'll suggest Searx/SearXNG as a search engine. It's self-hosted, but you can find public instances at https://searx.space/

If you decide to go the self-hosted route, it's trivial to deploy with searx(ng)-docker. Being a meta-search engine, it can pull results from Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, dictionaries, torrent sites, etc; this gives it a degree of customisability that traditional search engines don't have.

I'll also mention Whoogle, which serves as a libre front-end to Google, although it doesn't currently support any other search engines.

I run my own mail server and host all my websites on a cheap Linode instance ($5/mo) - it can be a pain in the ass to setup, but once it's up and running, there isn't much you need to do. Been running for 15 years now.

For email, calendar, notes and contact I recommend SOGo Groupware, open source solution with activesync.

- https://www.sogo.nu/

IMVHO you should not look at "alternatives" in the sense of "substitute a WebApp with another" but in workflow terms:

- emails? They are normally valuable tool and personal stuff, they must not be outside your control as much as possible so GMail or Proton change nothing if you use them with their webmail. Just buy a domain, choose a hosted mail service, just because host one yourself is not that easy these days, sync or better grab your remote inbox to a homeserver and use your mail locally in your desktop. The local part means sync against your server the entire maildir, use a local MUA, with good search, tagging etc capabilities, my personal choice is notmuch, to sync mail muchsync, to grab mail fetchmail+MailDrop (but you might like OfflineIMAP or MBSync). Webmail served by your homeserver (i.e. MailPie or Modoboa or even the simple RoundCube) as a last resort if you aren't at your desktop;

- calendar/agenda? Similarly, personally I use org-mode, far more powerful than modern calendar, but again you might prefer different things, thou local and synced not centrally served.

- Drive? To share files there are various options from classic WebDAV to third party services no reason to be tied to one in particular if that's not yours, the rest of Drive is not really a thing IMVHO

- search? Just use Google Search is not more evil than any other player, there is no real open choice there, YaCy while have a public distributed network count just too few participants to be an alternative and the web is the web, you can't run your own.

- Maps? Again not much real alternatives, a PND is good enough for car navigation, for the rest there are very few other maps services but none as powerful as Maps just due to the scale. OSM is hyper-good in limited areas, very lacking elsewhere so not a real option.

- notes? The best I know are again Emacs/org-mode/org-roam etc combo, TiddlyWiki with a daemon to serve it might be another option, Zim another more limited but still light and classic for certain users.

Looking for alternatives in terms of substituting a player with another is a game loosed from start and does not solve anything: companies are not "good" or "evil" they just follow their interest, some might be less friendly then others, but interests in the game remain the same.

> I want to eventually move away, especially gmail

register your own domain name, either for personal or professional purposes

take some basic security precautions on your domain registrar account, use a long complex password that's not used for any other service anywhere else on the internet, and set up some form of 2FA for logins as well.

control your own authoritative DNS zonefile and choose where to set your MX records

choose a 3rd party email service such as the other recommendation here, fastmail, and set the MX records, SPF and DKIM appropriately

> register your own domain name, either for personal or professional purposes

I have a question about domains, for whoever might be able to answer. I've had my own domain for a few years, a .se domain (only because it's .se and my middle name ends in that, so I was able to make the whole thing read like my name but with a dot in it)

This is the Swedish TLD, which doesn't require you be a citizen to register. Is there any chance that the requirements for a TLD can change in the future and revoke my ability to own it? i.e. they start requiring you be a Swedish citizen to own a .se domain? Cause as it stands I just use the domain for my portfolio website which I could change whenever I want, but if I start tying my entire internet identity to that by registering it as my email everywhere, then it seems just as risky as using a gmail account that could get banned at any time.

If you're greatly concerned about that, choose a .net/.com/.org or similar, or a TLD belonging to your actual country of citizenship/residence.

Yes it's theoretically possible the Swedish authorities who control .se could do something else policy wise in the future.

Good to know. I suppose my next question is: is there any known instances of this happening in the past?

I suppose regardless, if it ever actually happened, it's not like you wake up one day and lose your domain. There would probably be time to buy a new domain and point all your accounts there before your next renewal.

I remember the sex, tech and sextech journalist had a domain, vb.ly, listed in Libya because of the .ly suffix, much like oreil.ly is today. When the PTPB found out she talked about <GASP!>sex</GASP!> they pulled her domain.

So yes, The Swedish government could revoke your domain because they're the government.

maybe buying a domain controlled by the "government" in a place that has two warring claimants-to-government engaged in a civil war isn't the best idea ever.

if somebody were to ask "what's the least politically stable nation on earth right now?", libya would certainly rank in the top 10

I could think of the Brexit: Britons lost the access to the .eu tld. But there was a really long sunset phase. More than two years I think?

I'd sayx it is not really probable that you'd would immediately be nuked off your tld. And I also can't see the Swedes pulling this move.

> Is there any chance that the requirements for a TLD can change in the future and revoke my ability to own it?

yes, see the EU commission forcing new rules on the company running the .eu tld after brexit

Seems like this is the only case of this happening. [1]Wikipedia:

> British citizens had their .eu domains suspended on January 1, 2021 for three months and then deleted on March 1, 2021 after a grace period to allow EU/EEA citizens to update the registration information to show their non-UK address. This is the first case of its kind where an institution managing an internet Top-level domain has withdrawn domains en masse for an entire country.

However, this seems like it wasn't actually a change in domain registration requirements. It was the fact that the peoples' citizenship status was changed. The original requirements[2] of .eu domains from launch was it was only for EU citizens, so it was really just keeping in line with its original requirements.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.eu

[2] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_06_...

it's fair enough to prevent new registrations, or even renewals

but they deleted domains people had legitimately purchased prior to usual expiry (in violation of existing contracts with the registrants)

standard EU commission pettiness

(meanwhile even the soviet union's .su is still usable)

Searching around here would be a good start

then things like this

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30528205

I have been off google (mostly) by: 1. Email: Zohomail 2. maps: apple maps (sometimes vet it with google maps to verify shortest path, etc) 3. drive: iCloud

Has been working fine so far.

I got rid of my smartphone altogether 2 years ago and haven't missed it at all (we use my wife's phone in the car for Google Maps).

Before that I tried de-Googled Android and the experience wasn't great. Many of the alternatives can ostensibly do what the Big Tech product does, but there are bizarre pitfalls that break the experience. Stuff like OSMAnd having no business names and taking literally 15 minutes to map a route across town.

Could you explain issues you have run into by ditching the smartphone and the solutions to those issues?

A few things come to mind for me:

- 2-factor auth (SMS or app based).

- Banking (in the UK now a lot of online purchases must also be verified through the banks app).

- Navigating in your city (public transport + just finding places by foot).

- Anything else you've come across that assumes everyone has a smartphone.

Also, what benefits have you found through ditching the smartphone?

>- 2-factor auth (SMS or app based).

I still have an old Blackberry for SMS 2FA.

>- Banking (in the UK now a lot of online purchases must also be verified through the banks app).

We have an Android tablet at home for Chromecast. I just use that. When we're out, I don't tend to make online purchases. When push comes to shove, PayPal is a plan C.

>- Navigating in your city (public transport + just finding places by foot).

I'm one of those people who always knows where North is, and which directions main roads run in. I guess I'm just doing whatever it is that people did 50 years ago?

>- Anything else you've come across that assumes everyone has a smartphone.

I usually just ignore the COVID check-ins if they are phone only. Only one person has stopped me and immediately didn't care when I showed them my dumbphone. Apart from that, literally nothing has caused an issue.

>Also, what benefits have you found through ditching the smartphone?

I am not constantly plugged into an online hate machine. I can look around and realise that, actually, people aren't all that shit after all.

I still use Gmail/Calendar but I do so through Fastmail. I like the Gmail client but I am happy to know I can ditch it anytime without drama. I have a number of domains and email aliases routing through Fastmail which has a copy of all my messages. So if I need to use another mail client, no biggie.

I also went back to Dropbox and love it. No Google drive client for Linux is bizarre.

Have a look at r/degoogle

Can we assume you're also trying to avoid iOS?

Alternatives to Android:

1. Librem - https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/

2. Pine - https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/

[Disclaimer - I haven't used these devices.]

Maybe someone can give me an idea: I have about 3TB+ images I need access to online (eg. easy, automated upload from iPhone, access and search when I am looking for an image (Google Photos style)) alongside secure backup. What's my best option that's also reasonable priced?

Start here. An app that helps you deploy your own server with various tools you need.

Platform on user's hosting provider for deploying private services, managed via mobile application.

https://selfprivacy.org/en/

Is there anything similar for the self-hosted space?

Technically this is a self-hosted space, the app deploys a NixOS script which builds everything for you. https://nixos.org/

The app runs you through clearly defined steps on how to purchase the server, domain, and register everything together.

You control the lot.

The NixOS script is available on their repo to view, and fork yourself too.

Their support is top notch, I've had many conversations with them, they have always helped me out. https://t.me/selfprivacy

From my conversations, and chats, it's run by someone that has poured a lot of personal money and time into the project. They are truly passionate with privacy, self determination, teaching others, and helping the community.

I thought "self-hosted" meant zero cloud providers, i.e., running on a home server with a firewall.

That is a good point, I thought self hosted meant you are the person in charge, and nobody else can access, mess with, or bugger it up but you.

You have corrected my assumption, thank you.

You could take their NixOS script and run it on your own Raspberry Pi 4, I guess?

Well after that message I did some digging and it seems like it can be used both ways.

For email, I forwarded all emails to my new email. The rest was easy, except for Youtube... I need to find a way to subscribe to channels without a Google account (it would be nice if they had RSS and an external link).

For Youtube, use FreeTube or NewPipe for desktop and mobile respectively.

newpipe app allows this

I use Namecheap for email. Dropbox for "drive" (I don't use it often).

I use YT, Google Search, and Google Meet. You cannot escape the first two, and the later is a display of professionalism for me as a freelancer.

I have been using Fastmail for roughly three years now and happy with it.

https://www.fastmail.com/gmail-alternative/

You can have a support ticket with an actual human at Fastmail, imagine that :)

+1 for Fastmail. They also championed the open JMAP standard [1] [2].

[1] https://jmap.io/

[2] https://fastmail.blog/open-technologies/jmap-new-email-open-...

The problem with the JMAP standard is that nothing seems to actually implement it. There is their proxy which was built in like a week and not updated and Cyrus. The latter which I couldn't (not for lack of effort) implement, and went back to dovecot which doesn't have an implementation.

Thunderbird

I really like the new Masked Email feature.

Are you worried about Fastmail being Australian based in any way?

Maybe for some, but it's never been a thought that's crossed my mind.

Been using them for, I think, 16 years.

Fastmail to replace gmail/calendar/contacts and some file storage (drive). I also use Syncthing as a replacement for google drive. Android, well, you know what the only alternative is.

Email:

Casual use - ProtonMail

Git and friends - Nixnet

Use FairEmail on Android and Geary (sometimes Aerc) on Linux.

fastmail has been great for e-mail.

Using it as a google drive alternative though but I'd like to move to a solution with client-side encryption. Should actually be doable with the webdav that fastmail exposes and rclone: https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000277882-Re...

And I miss google sheets.

Google Search —> you.com

Google Chrome —> Brave

Gmail —> ProtonMail

Google Docs —> Notion

What suggestions does anyone have for phone providers? I've long wanted to move off of Google Fi

there is a whole subreddit about it : https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/

Tutanota for email.

Office365 is probably going to stay around for ten more years.

If you are interested in moving off of the Google ecosystem then you probably won’t be happy with the Microsoft version.

Sure, but if you're trying to get away from Google... out of the frying pan and into the fire, right?

OP didn't mention any dislike for other big players.

They just don't want google.