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?

  • JustARegularNerd@lemmy.worldEnglish
    28·
    24 hours ago

    Been degoogled for years at this point:

    • Stock Android --> LineageOS or GrapheneOS (no gapps)
    • YouTube --> Invidious*, NewPipe
    • Google Search --> DuckDuckGo, Brave Search
    • Google Play Store --> F-Droid, Aurora Store

    I’ve also decoupled from other similar services:

    • Outlook --> ProtonMail
    • Calendar --> Nextcloud*
    • OneDrive --> Nextcloud*
    • Windows, macOS --> Linux (after years of distrohopping, I found LMDE is incredibly stable while still being a nice “out of box” distro)
    • Google Maps, Apple Maps --> OSMAnd, Organic Maps

    I never used any online password manager myself, I went from writing passwords in a literal book to KeePass, to now Vaultwarden* for that

    * - self hosted

    • Lyra_Lycan@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      5·
      13 hours ago

      Nice, I have also chosen most of the same as you. For custom ROM there’s CalyxOS, which ironically makes a Pixel phone one of the best picks for deGoogleing
      I don’t like the proprietary style of Proton Mail, plus they charge to have more than one account logged in, which is very inconvenient, so I set up my own Mailcow instance

      For YouTube I highly recommend ReVanced

      For notes I use Apache-CouchDB and connect using Obsidian with the LiveSync plugin. Live sync is fantastic and is as close as I think I’ll ever get to OneNote.

      NextCloud is great, a pain in the arse to add existing files as you need to upload everything, but a few hours of uploading with Cloudflare set to DNS only is fine

      • JustARegularNerd@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        8 hours ago

        I’ve considered CalyxOS but prefer the hardening of GrapheneOS with no gapps - still means a phone decent on privacy. However I do try to keep an open mind, so if CalyxOS has additional privacy benefits to my existing setup I’d be interested.

        I agree with the proprietary style of ProtonMail point, and my workaround for multiple accounts has been to use my own domain and have email rules for delivering messages to the respective folder. I don’t have immediate plans to move from them, but I am watching the news cycle and have considered Tuta as an alternative.

        I haven’t used ReVanced, but I remember the original YouTube Vanced was a mod of the original YouTube apk - if that’s still the case, I feel like ReVanced would offer even less privacy than Invidious or NewPipe. However I’m happy to be corrected.

        I personally use Nextcloud notes but the Obsidian setup you have sounds interesting, especially if it’s like OneNote - I’ll keep it in mind!

        Completely agree on your Nextcloud points - I uploaded my uncompressed Telegram archive to it, which took like 12 hours over my Gigabit lan. I suspect it hated the sheer amount of small files