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Trying to de-Google my life bit by bit. What should I do to move away from gmail?
I'm considering self-hosting, but might prefer to use a paid email provider. Perhaps ProtonMail?
I'm considering self-hosting, but might prefer to use a paid email provider. Perhaps ProtonMail?
Oh hey! I undertook a personal project to 'de-google' my life entirely, so I've definitely got some perspective on this task. It took probably about 2 years in total, but don't let that discourage you. Email was probably the most complex thing as I also had an added challenge of having everything self-hosted, but here is a list of things which I have de-googled: [there's probably some more I have forgotten, they really had their grips in tight!]
Also:
Phones have been rooted and LinieageOS installed with no google services. F-droid and entirely free and open software/apps.
I have also offered my 'de-googling' service to many family members, so I'm now hosting quite a few services for them as well.
There's a lot of information contained in any one of these points, and I learned a huge amount along the way and thoroughly enjoyed the journey. If you want me to elaborate on any of these points feel free to ask!
EDIT:
I'd like to emphasise the 'bit by bit' part of your post. A lot of people are discouraged due to the sheer amount of work required to pull all of the tentacles out. But it is important to remember that it can be as slow a process as you want, but bit by bit you eventually pry your way out. It takes patience and persistence, but in the end I believe is thoroughly worth it.
I already have a few of those covered, having never given them up to Google in the first place. I guess I'm most curious what your approach to cloud storage is. I'm also interested in what self-hosted solutions you came up with for email/calendar.
For cloud storage I use Nextcloud. I used to run owncloud and jumped over when it was forked, the rate of development is very impressive. Their android app is really great, particularly their auto-sync option, which means any photos/videos we take on our phones automatically get uploaded to the server the same way as google's sync works. It's so nice never having to worry about transferring photos, you hop on your computer and they are already there. My wife's phone died last month [stupid 5x hardware fault], and there were no problems worrying about lost photos.
For calendar/contacts I used to run radicale, which is a CalDAV/CardDAV server. It works really well and I highly recommend it for a standalone system. I have just recently migrated this task over to Nextcloud as well though, as I was impressed with their offering and how it all integrates to produce an experience similar to google's in one place. [Note that I still have radicale on standby as I may revert back, I'm still not comfortable having so many eggs in one basket. But, at least it's my basket, haha]
Email is the most complex, but the software is simple. Postfix as the MTA, dovecot for IMAP. Those are the basic components which will give you a mail server. You can throw in things like amavis and spamassassin for filtering, and perhaps roundcube if you want webmail [though Nextcloud has a webmail client as well].
If you want even more specific instructions on email setup, let me know, happy to have a discussion and talk you through it. Or, hit me up on my XMPP server ;-)
If you care only and only about file storage(as in, no contacts, calendar etc.) I found Seafile to better than Nextcloud.
It's faster and uses less resources. The downside is, as I said, you get only file storage. If you find self-hosting to be too expensive, Backblaze is good, and you can encrypt all your files if you don't trust them.
For only file storage, there's also the option for syncthing, which has been very very good in my experience.
It's P2P though, not quite the same as the other options.
Let me throw Resilio Sync into the ring.
While it's P2P, they have clients for pretty much everything (as it's what Bittorrent sync grew up into) and I have all my syncs writing to my NAS devices with their native applications.
I've been running Seafile for a few years now and while it's good, I found their update process cumbersome at best and occasionally painful. Additionally, their reverse-proxy support is lackluster at best if you wanted to pack it (and other services) behind NGINX using path-based routing.
This is the main step I haven't taken in my own de-googling - how well does it work for you? What phone hardware are you running, how stable is LineageOS on it, and what replacement do you use for something like maps & navigation where Google is obviously hugely dominant?
It's been about 18 months now with zero google services on my phone, and it's going really well.
I won't lie, it is a bit of an adjustment, just because google becomes a bit of a crutch. The quality of apps was always a bit of a stopper for many, but even in the last 18 months the quality of FOSS alternatives in f-droid has come a long way.
Lineage os is incredibly stable for me. I run it on my phone and my wife's phone [Nexus 6 and Nexus 5x, respectively], though I also have used it on Nexus 4 and 5.
For maps, the usual standard is OSMand, which is the openstreetmaps app. The UI of this app has never been stellar, but again the latest versions of this have come a long way in regards to usability. Its different to gmaps, but once you get used to it, it is a great app to use. There is also the more recent 'Maps', which has a much more modern interface and is very nice to use. The navigation isn't as 'smart' as gmaps in regards to traffic, but it's a small price to pay for me personally.
There is huge movement happening in this space at the moment though, with many people pushing back against google's huge price increase for access to their location/maps services, so companies like mapbox are really pushing their own services in response [based on OSM data].
There are also open source location backends [unifiedNLP] which add support for wifi and cell tower positioning, ranging from using mozilla's location DB, to using your own offline DB.
The good thing is you can always just install f-droid on your phone right now and see what apps are on there [it doesn't mess with play store in any way], and even try them out.
The location backend does take some fiddling at first but once it is setup you never have to worry about it again.
I know some of my friends like Waze for navigation, though I'm not sure if you can run that on LineageOS or even in a browser.
Waze is owned by Google.
I wasn't aware of that. Thanks!
Waze is owned by google though; it's basically just a different front-end to google maps.
Protonmail is good, I've heard tutanote is pretty decent as well. Personally I wouldn't self host an email as it can be quite a bit of work.
Do you know how ProtonMail encrypts your mail? Can I provide them with a public key? Or is it just that my data is encrypted at rest on their machines?
This page should answer your questions.
I've personally switched to ProtonMail, but I can't get rid of gmail for the time being because of a bunch of business contacts still using it, and getting friends and family to actually change the address they use to send you things is almost impossible. I also have ~2000 business cards with my main business gmail address printed on them.
Is the PGP key generated from my password?
I think it is but I don't know a lot about encryption. When I got my account there was actually two passwords. The account password and mailbox password. The mailbox password was the one that generated the encryption key. Now I think they combined the two for new accounts.
Couple of links, hopefully these explain it:
https://protonmail.com/security-details
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/6dtz4l/how_exactly_does_the_protonmail_encryption_work/
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/71cmko/are_contacts_encrypted/
Just learned protonmail will work with my domain, which seems obvious but didn't occur to me until now. No reason to figure out the self-hosting (for my purposes at least).
I've used Fastmail for years and am very happy with them. I was persuaded to switch by a blog post they did about their development of JMAP, an open-standards replacement for IMAP (which seems to be a truly dreadful protocol to work with).
I pay ~$10/year for a custom domain registration and then the $50/year Fastmail plan lets me have anything@mydomain.com forward to one unified inbox. That's very useful because I can give each website its own address, and if it leaks onto a spam list I can blacklist that address permanently. I briefly looked at ProtonMail but discarded it because they didn't support catch-all email aliases which is crucial to making that work (it looks like that's changed and they now support catch-all aliases).
I used Fastmail for a while, back when their domain was fastmail.fm. That was a bit of a pain, since people kept sending emails meant for me to myname@fastmail.com, and I'd never get them. Explaining my email address over phone was also surprisingly hard the few times I had to do it.
It's probably much less of a pain now that they use .com. That was by far the hardest part.
I was lucky enough though that the domain mylastname.no was available, so eventually I bought that one, and I'm paying the domain host a little extra to host my email for me as well. It was actually surprisingly easy to set up Thunderbird and my phone to fetch my email from their server, and I know my emails are stored by a European company on European soil. I've offered to set up email accounts for my family as well, but none of them have requested one so far.
I use FastMail: https://www.fastmail.com/
You can review some of your options here: https://www.privacytools.io/#email
This Dutch provider is also worth mentioning: https://soverin.net/
They have close ties to the Dutch equivalent of EFF.
There was a comment chain here on Tildes earlier today about degoogling which might help you along: https://tildes.net/~tech/601/google_wants_websites_to_adopt_amp_as_the_default_approach_to_building_webpages_tell_them_no#comment-1q43
I've been on Protonmail a couple of years at this point. Largely happy.
Lack of full-text search is slightly frusstrating.
Modoboa is basically a one-click solution for self-hosting mail. Love it and will rep it until the end of time. Even has calendar support!
Self-hosting's honestly really fun, if a bit frustrating; totally recommend it.
I really like ProtonMail, especially the fact that you can have multiple addresses point to the same inbox.
Email changes are, from my understanding, the most difficult part so I like seeing the recommendations here.
For my de-googling - bit by bit - I'm cheating by switching services to the Synology services on my prebuilt home server from them. The "Moments" photo sync and organization is practically a clone of Google Photos and iCloud Photos and it's what made my choice to get away from Google a bit easier - Google Photos just works so easily! They have Docker support as well for hosting lots of other non-native services easily as well (like BitWarden self hosting which is what I'm looking into now).
I set up Zoho to use my custom domain and I've been happy with it. It's nothing fancy but it gets the job done. I use Thunderbird and my smartphone's native POP app as clients.
Right now I'm using disroot.org, but I was looking into getting an mailbox.org account. It gives you free 3 customizable aliases and 15 random ones and since I only use email to register for websites anyways it's perfect for me.