Requesting resources for de-googling
I'm starting to get tired of being complacent about the fact that I am using Google's services when I'm well beyond the 'reasonable doubt' phase of Google being evil. They're a giant monopoly and I want to stop making them money as much as I possibly can.
Thankfully, I'm not as badly intertwined with them as I could be; I have already downloaded all the music I bought from them and since I have switched to iPhone, I'm not reliant on too many of their services. They do have some of my old files and pictures, but that shouldn't be too hard to get out. The biggest problem I can see is my email. Right now I'm actually paying $4/mo for an Amazon WorkMail account for a failed venture (which I'm planning on getting rid of), but I'm sure there are much better alternatives out there. I'd prefer something that has good spam filtering options including custom filtering. I was also wondering if anyone would recommend Apple's email service since I'm already paying for iCloud+ to store my backups.
Another more specific recommendation I need is for a replacement to Google Authenticator that works on iPhone. It looks like there are several options but I'm frankly not sure how to evaluate them.
If you have any other resources you'd like to share, please feel free to share.
I strongly suggest using a custom email domain. This makes your email address not reliant on your email provider: which is important, because if your email provider goes down / gets bought out / is worse than expected, you don't have to change emails or set up forwarding or the like.
I don't actually have any provider recommendations, though. Do make sure that whatever you end up going with doesn't get sent to the spam bin of Gmail accounts - that's a known problem with smaller hosts.
Other resources
If you like Android
So ironically enough, one of the better ways to rid yourself of Google services is to buy a Pixel. For a variety of reasons they're the de facto "standard" phone in the custom ROM ecosystem. Most Android distributions will run on (often exclusively) Pixels.
GrapheneOS is a security-focused distribution (for Pixels) that strips out all Google services from AOSP, and applies a myriad of security-related enhancements. It's extensively developed, well-made, and stable. Some Google features such as "push" notifications provide important functionality, though: those are optionally installable in a sandboxed fashion that treats them as a normal app, as opposed to their broad permissions in AOSP.
ProtonAOSP is a much more flashy distribution (also for Pixels) that is made by one of the GrapheneOS developers. It rolls back some of the security improvements of GrapheneOS and also makes other modifications in favor of performance, as well as including a bunch of customization options, in a much more similar fashion to LineageOS. It also replaces Google services with the same compatibility layer developed for GrapheneOS.
If you like Chrome
I personally prefer Chromium over Firefox for performance, security, and trust reasons. Unfortunately, similar to AOSP, the open source Chromium project still phones home and includes Google-specific features. Fortunately, there's a thriving ecosystem of comprehensive Chromium patches.
Community-run projects have mostly consolidated into Bromite (mobile) and Ungoogled Chromium (desktop). They're well maintained and kept up to date.
I personally use mailbox.org and I've been fairly happy with it. Just renewed for a second year.
Aye, the unlocked bootloader and open drivers is what really makes the Pixel phones amazing.
The OG Google-branded Pixel 3/4 are still top-notch phones and can be gotten used for dirt cheap.
Fastmail is excellent for email. I do not use them anymore because I don't email much (I still have a custom domain) but when I did used them I couldn't have been happier. I haven't used it myself but I heard from one of the recent ATP podcasts that their tool for importing data from Gmail is excellent.
As for the Google Authenticator replacement, I can wholeheartedly recommend Raivo. It's open source, free, syncs with iCloud (supports export too), and it's well designed.
I’ve been using Fastmail for 5 years and never had a single issue. Highly recommend them if you want to use a custom domain.
Another vote for Fastmail with a custom domain. Their UI is really nice, good spam filtering, and I think I’ve only seen one brief major outage in the almost three years I’ve been using them. I paid for three years up front after the free trial, which seems like a fair deal.
Yes and please @Akir if you're going this route, buy and use a custom domain. This is the single most important thing to do to put you in control of your own email.
Good registrar: Gandi - https://www.gandi.net
DM me if you need help with the setup.
Seconding the Gandi recommendation. My aforementioned custom domain is from Gandi for more than a decade and I've had no issues with them. Apart from the few years I used Fastmail through Gandi, I've been using their email service as well, which they provide with any domain for free, and it's more than enough for my casual needs.
Trust me when I say that I've long learned the value of a good domain. I'm just sad that I don't own the .com for my family name because of cybersquatters and now it's stuck in a presumed legal limbo since the registrar has renewal disabled.
So I'm currently using Gandi email service that comes with my domain name. I'm using this wildcard option (so
hello_backblaze@mydomain.comredirects tocontact@mydomain.ch). How easy is it to migrate this wildcard ?Usually easy. I have a wildcard on google workspace. Some email providers will make this an upsell though.
I'm specifically avoiding self-hosted solutions, as they add further complexity, making it harder to de-google, especially if bringing non-techies along for the ride. I avoid Amazon/Apple/Microsoft when I can because that's kinda a "out of the fireplace, into the fire" kind of transition.
Bitwarden works well for password management and two-factor...not sure how well it works for a drop-in replacement of Google Authenticator. I favor Bitwarden in part because of its open-source client and servers.
DuckDuckGo is the best search engine right now, in part because their Bang! system allows easy fallback to other search engines as needed.
I've been very happy with pCloud as a backup and cloud storage provider. 10GB for free is nothing to sneeze at. $330 for a lifetime 2TB storage is a steal, even if it only lasts 5 years. It has made phone and computer backup and filesharing seamless.
I mostly do without voice assistants now. After the initial 1 month adjustment period....I rarely miss them at all. In retrospect pulling out my phone and just clicking the buttons is better 99.9% of the time. I might setup a Mycroft in the kitchen, because being able to do math and set timers hands-free is very useful when cooking.
Firefox is pretty much the only browser alternative, and aside from the "Devs don't test Firefox" problem, has some awesome features that further help online privacy. Container tabs in particular empower you to cluster your site use cases together to avoid cross-contamination. Added bonus lets you be signed into different accounts on different container tabs.
I degoogled a few years ago and tried out lots of different stuff. Here's ultimately where I landed on everything:
Search: DuckDuckGo
Expected. I will say that I am currently trialing Kagi and liking it a lot, but I don't think I'll be signing on to it full time. $10/month is VERY steep, and I can't make it the default search on iOS.
Browser: Firefox
Obvs.
Mail, Contacts, Calendar: Fastmail
No complaints. Love it. Feature-rich and smooth. Especially love the new masked email feature that integrates with 1Password.
Passwords and Authenticators: 1Password
I tried Bitwarden and understand why people like it. I landed on 1Password because it was a bit more feature-rich, and the family account doesn't have a usercap (Bitwarden limited it to 6, I think? Not sure if that has changed or not). LOVE the masked emails feature and integration with Fastmail.
Music: Apple Music
It is possible (but super clunky) to upload music through iTunes to your account, and that music will appear alongside the streaming library, so I can now have all the benefits of a streaming library while being able to fill in the gaps myself (this was GPM's secret sauce before they shut it down).
Music Alternative: Astiga + pCloud
I mention this because you said you have a downloaded music library. Prior to going on Apple Music, I used this combo to make a DIY, no-effort personal music streaming server. The way it works is you upload music to your pCloud account, then link Astiga to it. Astiga creates a subsonic server for you, and you can stream the music to your devices over the internet using any subsonic-capable app (I used AVSub on iOS). It worked really well, and the only reason I stopped was that I ended up spending way too much AND pirating way more than I was comfortable with to try and "fill in" my library, so I opted to switch to a subscription streaming service instead.
Drive: Tresorit
It is PRICEY, but it works really well and has a fully-featured Linux client, which eliminated most of the other options on the table at the time (not sure what that landscape looks like now). I also tried out pCloud, but when I tried file recovery from them I ran into some issues, so I wouldn't trust them with anything mission critical. If you want a discount for your first year from Tresorit, do the trial and then at the end say that the price is too expensive to continue. They gave me a significant percentage off my first year, and I got them to drop it some my second year too on renewal (though I am now paying full price).
Photos: Jottacloud
It's not E2EE which I would like, especially for photos, but at the time I switched over this was really the only effortless option that could even come close to matching Google Photos.
Docs/Sheets: LibreOffice + Tresorit
Tresorit can be mounted as a network drive, so I can just open files on it directly in LibreOffice and edit them even if they're not locally on my computer. Works well. It's a little slow, but I assume that's because it has to encrypt/decrypt on opening and saving. Only a few seconds here and there. The one downside of this is that it doesn't really work with shared files. It works fine for me individually, but doesn't scale if you've got a lot of stuff that needs collaborators.
Keep: Standard Notes
Joplin is nice, but Standard Notes is better (IMO). The killer feature for me is the spreadsheet extension. For example, I have a weight tracking spreadsheet set up that I can update from the Standard Notes app on my phone. Easy and private -- my weights aren't going to some third-party app and its various trackers.
Maps: Apple Maps
It's good. Better than Google Maps in some ways, I think. While I love OpenStreetMap and what it enables, the OSM specific apps just aren't good enough for everyday use. I do hope they get there someday. I do still use Google Maps on the computer sometimes, usually for looking up local information.
For email, I just want to mention that I use PurelyMail. It's extremely cheap and it work really well.
+1 for PurelyMail.
I don't need to send a lot of emails so, it's very cheap (if you opt for advanced pricing) and just works.
For search: as someone who is using Kagi and paying for it, I've been quite impressed. Using DuckDuckGo, I feel like there's a definite sense that one is sacrificing search quality in exchange for not supporting Google. Kagi feels like it actually offers a better search that Google, especially in the ability to tweak the algorithm and rankings.
With that said, their costs seem quite surprising to me, and make me question how sustainable their service actually is: if I'm interpreting those numbers correctly, even at $10 a month, they would appear to be losing money, just in terms of pure computing cost, for a user making 1,000 searches a month, or around 40 searches a day.
I think the high per-search cost is likely to at least somewhat be a function of low absolute volume. It's not 100% clear from the post but it seems to suggest that number is just total infrastructure spend divided by total search count - which is quite reasonable, because that is what it costs them to serve a search today.
A lot of that spending (web crawling, page analysis, index storage, etc.) will scale with the size of the index rather than the number of queries, so as time goes on and user numbers hopefully go up that gets amortised quite significantly. Larger players also get to exploit more traditional economies of scale in their hardware, connectivity, etc., so as a finger in the wind guesstimate I can see them reducing those per-search costs 2-3x with 10x the active users.
They are loosing money (or rather: breaking even, without enough of a profit margin to pay salaries). They've brought up that they will be upping the price for new users soon.
I just realized that there is one Google service that may prevent me from entirely leaving them, and that's Google Voice. Right now there are a handful of people who only have my Google Voice number so I need some way to keep hold of it, and I really don't want to pay for another cell phone service. I've had it on Do Not Disturb for some time, so if anyone knows of any "pay as you go" VoIP providers that they would recommend where I can basically just use it to keep the phone number and collect voicemails and text messages.
My Good Reports site lists dozens of alternatives to Google products - including email platforms (Fastmail is an excellent option), password managers (Bitwarden is my pick), alternate search engines (Duck Duck Go and others), and so on. (Tildes itself is mentioned on the social networks page.)
And I agree that getting your own email domain opens up a lot of possibilities.
Thank you, this was exactly the kind of resource I was hoping to find.
Some good resources to find software alternatives:
Does anyone happen to know of a photo platform that provides the same type of feature extraction and search that Google does? Self hosted or paid would both be fine, but I haven't seen anything out there that brings in actual image analysis yet.
Part of me wants to say "hey, I'll build it myself, all the parts already exist" but honestly I also recognise the amount of other stuff I'm trying to do and ideally I don't want to consign this to the ever growing heap of started but not finished ideas!
Haven’t tried it at all myself so I can’t say anything about its quality or ease of use, but PhotoPrism fits the bill.
That may well be exactly what I need, thanks!
If you do end up using it, let us know how it goes! I’m curious to hear about it from someone with hands-on experience.
Just interesting. Is there any search engine which can filter out some language(s) like Google, for example
lr=-lang_ruremove Russian language from search.I checked if Kagi can do it and it appears it doesn't have language lenses / filters, but it DOES have both Regional lenses and domain lenses.
With it, you can lower/block domain names (and I think you can even make TLD filters, so you could filters on *.ru, or alternatively prioritize *.ua or whatever you're looking for). I don't know how the regional lenses work, I would guess it's a mix of language and ccTLD heuristics?
Related recent discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32720234
Self-hosted email is the hardest it's ever been, but also the easiest (vadosware.io) - 191 comments
Do you have any interest in self hosting email? If so, there are quite a few decent guides out there. Of course you have to pay hosting and domain registration costs, but those aren't very high.
I have run my own email server before and it is way too much of a pain and things are way too easy to mess up without realizing it. Beyond that, I only need one email user and the cost of that will generally be much lower than rolling out a virtual server.
The only downside to self hosting is that you’re much more likely to get out in the spam folder by bigger hosts like Gmail or Hotmail.
True. I haven't had problems with Gmail or pretty much any provider other than Hotmail, especially when you set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc. But Hotmail seems to simply not play nice with small hosts. And this is really unfortunate because squeezing out small hosts just promotes more centralization of these services among big corporations who then start deviating from protocol standards (but that is a soapbox for another day).
You’re right, but setting up all of those is an extra level of hassle that many people don’t want to deal with.
But you’re right, it is annoying that they punish small hosts. Especially when SPF and the other standards are specially designed to keep those types of hosts from being punished.
(Also, we’re showing our age by calling it Hotmail! I think it’s been Outlook for like a decade now…)
Haha. My wife still has an actual hotmail.com address (for when she has to sign up for things online that are likely to spam her in the future), so it will always be hotmail to me!