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?

  • octochamp@lemmy.ml
    1·
    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