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What apps have you tried to "de-google" yourself? (reddthat.com)

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by pleasestopasking@reddthat.com to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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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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[–] octochamp@lemmy.ml 1 points 8 hours ago

Email

Proton Mail, (paid) I switched 7 years ago and it's great, I've never looked back. I don't use the attached services like calendar and contacts because it's a little bit too walled-off for the integrations I need, but I do use ProtonVPN and Drive.
Thunderbird (free) on desktop, to access my IMAP or exchange email addresses (work etc) along with Proton Bridge so I never touch the Proton web app. On Android, I use Thunderbird for the IMAP addresses plus the Proton app, which isn't ideal but not sure what the alternative could be.

Calendar and contacts

Nextcloud (free) installed on the basic shared hosting for my personal website manages all my contacts
Etesync (free) is currently syncing my calendars, but I'm planning to swap this soon to the Nextcloud instance just to simplify things.

Notes / Resource management

Anytype (free) is incredible and I now run my life off of it. Took months to really get the hang of it but it's worth the effort.

Cloud storage

Proton Drive (paid) is great, I use it for all my work applications, sending to clients etc and sync my most important files, but only have 500gb storage so
Synology Drive (free) installed on the NAS I use for backups covers all my personal uses, including photo backups.

Browser

Firefox (of course), with uBlock Origin (of course)

Search

DuckDuckGo (free), I ran Kagi for a while but the company seems shady and the price is extremely high for what you get

Passwords

1Password (paid), migrated after the LastPass incident and before ProtonPass existed. It would make sense to save the money and switch to Proton but tbh 1Password has been great and I wouldn't risk the faff.

Documents

Honestly I don't have a lot of need for Google Docs replacements but when I do need to work on docs I'll use LibreOffice. If it needs to be shared I'd probably do a public share on Anytype, or use Proton Docs. More likely, someone else will have invited me to a Google doc and I'll have to sign in to use it.

Audio

PocketCasts (paid) is a great service. I also use Spotify (sorry, all my friends use it)

RSS

FreshRSS also set up on my web hosting so I get all my news/articles/substacks etc through ReadYou and Fluent Reader.

Google products I still use

Maps
YouTube (with uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock on both desktop and android), I just sadly can't let go of my carefully crafted algorithm oops