this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2025
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Asklemmy

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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?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 24 points 2 days ago (18 children)

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.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (8 children)

Replaced

  • Gmail -> Proton Mail
  • Keep -> Joplin
  • Docs -> LibreOffice + OpenDocument Reader
  • Drive 100 Gb -> Proton Drive (free 5 Gb)
  • Photos -> ente photos
  • Play Books -> ReadEra Premium + Kobo
  • Translate & Lens -> DeepL

Haven't been able to replace (just yet)

  • Wallet
  • Maps & Earth
  • Sheets
  • Home
  • Calendar
[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Since you already use proton you should check out proton calendar.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

We tried it but my wife hated it. With Proton, you have choose one subscription. I already use Pass plus so I can't have Mail plus (shared calendars) without Proton ultimate which is an overkill in my situation and too expensive.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 13 points 2 days ago (8 children)

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

I always like seeing the details, and I can't imaging looking at a map and up not being north. It would be like reading a book turned sideways -- hypothetically I could do it, but it would require far more brainpower to interpret than it's worth. I do like my location kept as the centerpoint though. That's really nice, but apparently hard to implement. The "re-center" feature on Google Maps is my friend.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Would you mind hitting us with a direct link to tubular? This is one of the biggest hindrances to getting completely off google

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)
[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Thanks โ™ฅ๏ธ

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I can't get it to work. It works for you?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (8 children)

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 โ‚ฌ10 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
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[โ€“] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago (2 children)

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.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I fucked off Google Photos and now run Immich from a Raspberry Pi with raid 1 SSDs.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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

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[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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 2

but rather do

Line Item 1

Line Item 2

Yes, I agree it's rather stupid.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (7 children)

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

Holy shit I've been using markdown message boards for years and
you just blew my mind

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