Comment by TranquilMarmot
19 hours ago
I spent the past month "de-Googling" my life after I saw a notice in my Gmail inbox that it was 20 years old. I took a step back and realized just how invested into the Google ecosystem I was. Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Drive, Maps, Keep, Photos, YouTube, FitBit, Android. Basically my entire digital life. My goal was more diversifying than security/privacy, but security/privacy is a really nice bonus.
I ended up going with Proton because they had a good solution for mail, calendar, and drive which I was looking to replace. I set up my custom domain to point to it and have my Gmail forwarding to it - any time I get an email to the old Gmail address I go change it on the website or delete the account altogether.
For Google Docs / Keep, I switched over to Obsidian and pay for the sync there. It's a great replacement for my main use case of Docs / Keep which is just a dumping ground for ideas.
For Google Photos, I now self-host Immich in Hetzner on a VPS with a 1TB storage box mounted via SSHFS. I use Tailscale to connect to it. It took a few days to use Google Takeout + immich-go to upload all the photos (~300GB of data) but it's working really well now. Only costs $10/mo for the VPS and 1TB of storage.
Android I think I'll be stuck on - I have a Pixel 8 Pro that technically supports Graphene but there are too many trade-offs there. Next time I need a new phone I'll take a serious look at Fairphone but I think the Pixel 8 Pro should last a few more years.
My FitBit Versa is really old and starting to die - I ordered one of the new Pebble watches and am patiently waiting for it to ship!
YouTube I'm stuck on because that's where the content is. I have yet to find a suitable replacement for Google Maps - OpenStreetMap is still really hard to use and gives bad directions.
>Proton
Using proton as well, but if you're stuck on the free tier you can't use any 3rd party email clients.
>YouTube
Using Google takeout for Youtube will give you a .csv of your subscriptions and playlists (just be sure to un-check getting a download of your videos). From there you can get the rss feeds and use RSSguard as a subscription viewer/media player, this site was a big help in figuring things out https://charlesthomas.dev/blog/converting-my-youtube-subscri....
(From that link, about adding new subscriptions)
>The only real trick is that most YouTube channels use a vanity URL and it’s more complicated to get the channel ID in those instances.
Go to the channel's videos page ( https://youtube.com/.../videos ) -> right-click -> View page source -> search for "rssUrl" . It'll look like https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC...
Bonus: Replace the "?channel_id=UC..." with "?playlist_id=UULF..." to get a feed without shorts and livestreams.
I love Proton but the idea of subscribing and committing to renew annually is a turn off. There's probably be a huge market behind the psychology of this.
They should offer a lifetime option for the core service and monetize the add-ons and new features.
That's exactly the reason why so many people prefer giving up their data, their privacy, their freedom.
Personally I'm happy to pay proton a few bucks a month to not have to give up those things.
I'm not criticizing those that do, just that given my financial situation the trade off is simply not worth it.
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Paying for a service that you use on an ongoing basis and that is very important (like email) is probably the best possible choice, since it aligns what you're paying for and what the company is working on. In the model you suggest the core service will atrophy slowly because the money is in the add-ons. This is why I'm happy to pay annually for my Fastmail account.
I like mapy.com as a Google Maps replacement. It's essentially a very good OSM renderer, with a great website and app, including offline access, routing, and real-time traffic. Also very good bike/hike routing, if that's your jam.
But there's no substitute for GMap's POI database.
I second mapy. I've replaced Google maps with this one ~5 years ago and never looked back. You can download specific maps for a country and within that specific federal states to reduce space consumed. I use it mostly for biking and hiking - you can plan tours with scaling duration/kilometers which is nice for a region you are unfamiliar with. Like parent wrote, offline access, routing, RT traffic. Can recommend.
> supports Graphene but there are too many trade-offs there
What are the tradeoffs? I have been following GrapheneOS for a while, and it doesn't seem like there are many tradeoffs.
> OpenStreetMap is still really hard to use and gives bad directions.
OpenStreetMap is a database, and most commercial services that are not Google use it. E.g. Uber or Lyft.
You just need to find an app that you like. CoMaps is nice, OSMAnd has a lot of feature but the UX is harder. And of course you can contribute to OSM and make it even better than it is! You'll see it's a great community!
I use https://brouter.de/brouter-web on my laptop. Someone told me that you can use brouter as the nav engine for Osmand and thus greatly improve speed and accuracy for navigation, but I have not yet tried this.
And I recently installed GMaps WV from Fdroid as a wrapper for Google Maps. It gives current traffic information but I don't really know if it is even close to gmaps.
Can you use GrapheneOS with your bank app? With a digital wallet for NFC cards? With Uber or Lyft? (Asking seriously, not rhetorically.)
My understanding from looking into this two years ago is that it's hit or miss for banks (depending on if they opt into device attestation stuff), no for NFC / Google Wallet, and yes for Uber / Lyft.
Apparently the common workaround for the Google Wallet stuff is to pair a GrapheneOS phone with a stock Android smartwatch.
Edit: Here's some additional information on banking apps: https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...
Apparently the common recommendation these days is to use Curve Pay as a virtual card provider on GrapheneOS, which can then route to arbitrary underlying cards. And evidently Google Wallet does work for things that aren't payment cards (airline tickets, transit passes, etc.) on GrapheneOS.
I use Graphene but with Google play store app. Here in Europe my banking apps and 2fa apps (SecureGo) work flawlessly. NFC cards work with PassAndroid and FOSSwallet, both from Fdroid. I've had issues installing rather new games via the play store, but most often it takes a couple of tries or a waiting period to work in the end.
My friend uses a pretty hardened (as per him; I didn't indulge him when he wanted to give me the gory details) Graphene setup on his few years old Pixel.
Bank apps - as per him none work. Uber (no Lyft here; other taxi apps) work flawless. Payment apps, he said is a coin toss. On his phone even WhatsApp doesn't work. He anyway prefers Signal (which prob. nobody else uses in his circle except maybe me who has it installed on a secondary phone) or plain SMS. Basically most of the "normal" apps that add integrity checks don't work but he is fine with that.
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I use it with my bank app ymmv
Yes, these would be my concerns as well. In the past, I would install custom ROMs. Then I stopped doing that and would only root my device. But of late, way, way too many apps refuse to work if rooted (apps that used to be fine with it before).
Now I just accept life as it is.
Contactless payments is the the big one that doesn't work and probably won't. You can do in app payments via Google pay though
Many banking apps work fine though not all.
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This is a question that I rarely see answered but would love to know as well.
Someone showed me OSMAnd recently while we were hiking. I installed it as soon as I got home. Great for hiking.
Then last week I used it for navigation (on a phone with no SIM card).
Absolutely. Terrible.
Worst navigation app I've seen. Told me to make a turn at an intersection that did not allow turns. Then at another intersection, it told me to "Turn left", but the display clearly showed it going straight. I'm guessing that the straight road probably is angled 1 degree or something at the intersection and the app was viewing that as a turn.
This is a really interesting feedback. I've used OSMand for maybe five years, and never had issues like you're describing. I've always felt that the search was absolutely awful, so I used Google Maps for that and then put the points of interest into my map. Nevertheless, I find the display particularly dense and confusing to configure, and so I also have been using Organic Maps lately, which may provide a simplified experience that's a bit more polished.
I wonder if there was some issue with the map data in the area you were driving in that led to the issues you experienced. I've used OSMand in Belize, Mexico, California, Connecticut, New York, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine and had a good experience, especially with the offline maps.
I get similar navigation issues with Google maps. I still use Google maps for driving because the live traffic is important to me, but other posts on here mention other apps with live traffic so I'll give them a try.
For an open source Android app for OpenStreetMap data, I like Organic Maps, and it normally works great with locally-cached maps. I've had better luck with it than with Google Maps or Apple Maps on phones.
(Though, I should mention that twice in the last year I've had Organic Maps become hopelessly confused about where I was, and where I should go. Both times, it had gotten a good GPS location, but then got confused while being out for an extended period of time, like maybe it was dead-reckoning only after that initial lock.)
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I found myself in a similar situation and also started de-googling, which is much nicer and liberating than I was fearing.
I did the exact same thing with Immich (what a great software, by the way!).
And in case it helps:
Instead of always relying on google maps, I now mostly use CoMaps (https://www.comaps.app/). Way better than using directly OpenStreetMap. And for my Pixel 7, I switched to LineageOS with gapps (https://lineageos.org/) and I'm not missing anything and am very happy with it.
Also, I'm trying now Nextcloud (https://nextcloud.com/), with a setup similar to Immich, and now I do believe there is life beyond google, and it's a better life.
Why did you switch to LineageOS and not Graphene with your pixel 7?
Convenience. It will be maintained for much longer. And I'm used to it by now.
Does Immich read real file names of photos from iOS Photos metadata? I don't even know whether Apple preserves it and exposes to other apps?
I used Ente and I learned all the files I had "added/uploaded" to iCloud photos had lost their real names (that I had painstakingly given them over the years/decades) when ente exported to those photos back on my laptop via their desktop app and were these long random uuid strings kinda names. That was my yikes moment and I was glad I had still kept my photos outside of iCloud and Ente. And it is not even Ente's fault. Apple does this skullbuggery.
Are there PAYG hosted instanes of Immich?
Do you mean skulduggery or was that a deliberate 'bone apple tea'?
> OpenStreetMap is still really hard to use and gives bad directions.
https://www.magicearth.com/ works well for car navigation with OSM data, and https://cycle.travel/ is the best way to navigate on a bike, also with OSM data.
In which country do you live, if I might ask?
Was about to mention magic earth, but of course someone else has recommended it already. Was talking with a coworker about degoogling and they brought up this. Surprisingly works good enough where I live.
On android I degoogled almost everything by using Fossify apps. Only gmail and maps remain for obvious reasons. My photos are now synced with Syncthing through my wireguard vpn. Calendar/Notes have local backups that are also synced. The simple camera I use (fossify too) works with physical directories instead of meta directories that I hate.
I've taken steps to degoogle too, but like you I've rather stuck on Android because over the years I've ossified a set of tools I like (KeepassDX and Syncthing are really important, and Firefox on Android is actually damn good).
GrapheneOS lets you use Play Store apps
Which you need to buy a Pixel to be able to use, Pixel being Google's phones. Bit of a Catch-22 there. I guess you could buy one used.
It's quite possible to use Android without a Google account.
I am very interested in moving my photos and data to a self-hosted solution but am a little anxious about backups.
Do you simply trust hetzner to not lose the data on your 1TB storage box?
(I am aware that I am currently trusting google and dropbox to do just that.)
Set up your Hetzner boxes in a European location so that they are in the same network zone. Activate automatic snapshots and Hetzner does 7 snapshots (a full image of your box) a day. The snapshot is never saved at the same location as the server running your box, but at one of the other locations in the same network zone.
It is still viable to self-host everything from photos to mail yourself and sync to cloud/storage services as disaster recovery. It helps if you have an infrastructure background but anyone can set this up. Never trust just one service; no company is too big to fail and durability is always best effort, even if that effort is very good. Mail is the most annoying service to self-host, not because it's technically difficult but because deliverability is a long-term reputation function that easily deteriorates from misconfiguration or neglect. Nevertheless I've been my own MX and storage provider since the early '90s and it's too late to change my ways now, you just have to keep up with the gold standard as it varies.
The biggest hazard, especially if the whole family uses your stuff, is key-person risk, since infrastructure requires maintenance. The second biggest is being out of your depth in securing it.
My only regret in all my years of self-hosting was that time I returned a portable /24 to APNIC. Still stings even if it was the right thing to do, civically speaking.
I retain gmail & hotmail accounts for deliverability checks and as signup swamps.
To be fair if both google and dropbox can't take care of 1TB of data, who can?
My solution against photo anxiety is to actually look at them and decide to physically print the best ones every year. More likely to be used as gifts or just fun to look through them in a photo album, nobody is going to sit next to you on a phone or computer but bring out an old photo album and everyone is on it.
I do professional wedding photography as a side business.
Yes, please print your photos! I love it when my clients print their photos, and I print my favorites as well. There's still something magical about a real, physical photo vs. digital.
I have vast archives of digital photos and you know what? I barely look at them, but I have prints up all over my walls, in my wallet, etc and I enjoy them all the time.
Back it up to S3 glacier, or to Backblaze. The cost of it is pretty low, much lower than a VPS / bare metal box + 1 TB cost for the photo app hosting.
Technically I have no big doubts about S3 Glacier.
But what happens if you don't use that stuff for a long time. You are in hospital when the bill needs to get paid. Your credit card gets stolen and the number needs to changed. Whatever personal crisis that you are not able to take care of life as usual for some weeks. They will just delete your data before you are back in business.
Does anyone know how long it takes, how many warning mails will come? I have very little data in AWS, but I more or less constantly feeling it might happen to me. Maybe not because of such big crisis, but just the simple fact that my bank will reject the automatic payment requiring a PSD2 second factor and I miss the email...
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I started degoogling 4 years ago.
I'm still using docs, sheets, drive and maps.
Most of it because my clients use it. But drive and maps out of convenience. Don't know if there even exist something with a similar feature set as maps.
I probably could move my stuff to proto drive but the docs and sheets integration is vital for me.
You should set up a local machine for Immich. I’ve got it running locally, with the photos on spinning rust and thumbs and db on NVME. It’s mind blowing how fast it is. Scroll to three years ago, lift the mouse button, and every thumb loads in a quarter second. Data intensive stuff is when you notice that the server is in the next room. It’ll pay for itself in a couple years. Treat yourself. :)
I degoogled and deappled and ended up with a Sonim flip phone. It’s like, Android 11 without Google services but I don’t mind the lack of security because there’s basically no personal data on it.
I’m amazed at the feature parity of immich, it works great. Jellyfin for media and Pydio for Dropbox/drive functionality, email via infomaniak 12$ a year.
Mapy.com (previously Mapy.cz) has global coverage too. App too, and imho its cartography is good.
Haha almost identical experience but self hosting immich with off site backups. Wild how difficult it is to change your email with certain websites! Several months later still fighting with various sites.
I have an iphone so I use Apple maps and an icloud based obsidian vault, and that is all that is tied to Apple which feels fine for now.
There is CoMaps on iOS that is open source and is based on OpenStreetMap. Highly recommended.
I am also in the process of doing the same with Gmail to Proton. The process isn't really that painful and kind of fun, actually. Anytime I get an email on Gmail, I go and update it to point to my Proton email.
Note that they mention using a custom domain. I strongly encourage you to do this (sounds like you don't), because then you don't depend on the mail provider. After Gmail, I started using my own domain and changed provider every year (Proton, Fastmail, and I landed on Migadu).
The key is that if you have your domain, you can swap the provider and nobody has to know about it.
How do you de-google yourself properly when every 3rd website stops working entirely unless you whitelist some google stuff in your content blocker?
1) "De-googling" doesn't need to be a binary, all-in or all-out situation. Any reduction in reliance of Google (or any single point of failure) is good. Diversifying the big stuff (mail, storage, etc.) is a great start. About last on the list is worrying about the occasional allowance for gstatic.com or whatever.
2) While I occasionally need to allow some scripts from google, it's absolutely nowhere near 1/3rd of sites.
I've de-Googled myself and this idea does not match my reality.
I've largely de-Googled myself, but not my family. The only Gmail I have is from a few old accounts that hardly ever email me anymore; I've been on Apple's email, calendar, photos, etc. for years, and use Kagi for search. Nor do I feel any pull back toward Google. The biggest involvement I have is for the correspondents I have who are still using Gmail; every time I email them, my stuff ends up in Google's system.
It is almost always blocking first party JavaScript and XHRs that causes breakages. I have rarely had to enable Google anything in uMatrix to get a site to work (more often it is Cloudflare), and it is only if the site insists on reCAPTCHA.
Switch to an iPhone.
Apple's software and services (sync, drive, photo backup etc) are so inferior, especially compared with Google's (technically speaking), you'd be anyway forced to use third party (often cross platform) solutions. No risk of going deep into Apple's ecosystem ;-)
Having used both Google and Apple for notes, calendar, docs, cloud back up (general files) and photos I have come to believe Google has the better tech but Apple has the better product. It fascinates me how Google just can’t design a simple and intuitive UI for its products, which are by all means technically superior.
I'm a happy icloud photos user. Other sync is not so good, but icloud photos works fine.
How many photos do you have in iCloud?
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Apple limits other apps from performing actual syncing without being in the foreground. That’s a lockin feature.
iCloud stuff is generally fine, except for iCloud Drive which is atrocious.
What’s the point though? So you don’t come across as a Google shill?
Not the author, but it's nice to support alternatives.