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Comment by hashr8064 | Hacker News Reader

> Suggestions are welcome for good alternatives,

I'm in the move away myself. Here's some services I've started using, in many areas I'm still looking for other replacements. Hopefully others can help.

1. E-Mail : protonmail.com, I really like this one, great service.

2. Video Calls : I'm currently using signal to some extent, not very happy though, would really like something like Hangouts.

3. Browser : Firefox

4. Phone : Apple

5. Things I'm still looking for : Google Calender, Drive, Chat, Backup Storage services.

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Using ProtonMail too. Very happy, and you get to use ProtonVPN too.

Also install Privacy Badger extension (or other tracker-/ad-blocker) in your browser and block Google Analytics etc.

And for site-owners that use Google Analytics now: there are alternatives, like e.g. Matomo.

I've used Signal for a while and I think it's great although admittedly I don't use video calls on it very often (mostly because the people I need to video call are mostly not on Signal).

For Drive the best alternative I've found is Dropbox. It's not free but at least the business model isn't (yet) about monetizing your data.

I tried Signal the other day to call a friend in the US from Greece and was blown away by the quality. It was as if I was using a landline to call someone in my city, it was amazing. Even the latency was nonexistent, which I don't know how it happened since they're bound by the speed of light.

For video calls, you should try zoom.us. From what I've seen, they have the best streaming infrastructure of any of the major players (FaceTime, Hangouts, Webex, GoToMeeting). Apps for all the major platforms, too. The only bad thing is that if you're on a multi-way call, they limit you to 40 minutes.

> The only bad thing is that if you're on a multi-way call, they limit you to 40 minutes.

40m limit is for free accounts. Paid will get you video calls as long as you want to go.

Besides some needed minor UI tweaks, I love Zoom.

> The only bad thing is that if you're on a multi-way call, they limit you to 40 minutes.

To be clear, that's for the free version. You can pay to remove this limit (along with getting some other features).

On Protonmail: I've been using it for about a year now and their spam filtering is terrible. I was thinking about migrating my yahoo account to them but it does nothing to prevent the huge amount of recruiter spam I get. I also am not a fan of how little space you get with them.

FWIW, Fastmail filters spam very well for me.

> 5. Things I'm still looking for : Google Calender, Drive

Fastmail provides a DavCAL calendar and some storage space with their email offering. They also have a wonderful browser client (much better that gmail at least for me).

+1, I recommend FastMail's web client too if you like to manage your email and calendar using a browser. It's fast and snappy, has a clean interface (they have a couple of themes you can choose from), and it's pretty lightweight (for example, a gmail tab uses 195 MB for me while Fastmail's uses 51 MB).

For file syncing, I recommend Syncthing and/or Nextcloud (they're slightly different, Syncthing syncs directories peer-to-peer extremely well, Nextcloud is an OSS Dropbox alternative).

If you already have an apple phone the apple calendar is competent. Keybase is a potential alternative to drive (if you don't use it on mobile much). Signal for chat

Drive: Dropbox Backup: Backblaze B2

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