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Comment by cageface | Hacker News Reader

I went a step further still and divested myself entirely of Google services. The real name debacle made me realize just how dependent on a single company I'd become and how little recourse I might have if that company cut me off. This was particularly troubling given how Kakfaesque Google's "support" is.

So now my eggs are strewn around in several independent baskets and I intend to keep it that way.

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Some postings on how people distribute their eggs and into what baskets would be interesting.

Yes! I've seen several times how people say that they'ev abandoned Google services and moved on.. but never to where.

Like, what's an alternative to syncing your own calendar and so on.

Seconded. I'm a bit interested in this, myself. Are there any comparable email services? Or calendar?

For email I went to fastmail.fm.

Blogging I'm now doing at WordPress and also a static Jekyll blog on S3.

Contacts I'm keeping in Address Book and backing up by hand.

Calendar I'm just keeping on my Phone and backing up by hand.

I'm still figuring out what to do with Picasa. May just go for static galleries on S3.

I use NewsFire on my Macbook instead of Reader.

I'm using DuckDuckGo for searching.

I never really used Google Docs anyway so that was easy.

I still use Chrome but I've turned off everything (I think!) that sends my data to Google.

All in all this is more work than a single, centralized account but I feel better about it.

well, i decided to drop gmail because of this (at first i dropped search, but nothing else was as good at the time and search is pretty much critical for my work - and i still use disconnect, ghostery and adblock plugins, so my search and browsing in general are anonymous-ish).

i looked around for a different provider. the best i found was http://www.runbox.com/ - it wasn't as good, but it was the closest (the main feature missing was tags; their support was very good).

but in the end i ended up handling email myself (on a linux box). it's very much not the equivalent, in that i use a console client (mutt). but the part that i most needed - search - works well using mairix http://www.rpcurnow.force9.co.uk/mairix/ (very fast, flexible command line tool for searching maildirs).

unfortunately this doesn't generalise well - i can't imagine most people would be as happy using command line/curses based tools or configuring their own email services.

Oh how I miss MH. :) I'd use it now, except I've really gotten used to html email.

Nice tip on runbox.com.

I've been compiling a list of places that I could move to and use my own domain.

So far I had:

lavabit.com fastmail.fm zoho.com domains.live.com

Might give them all a go and report back in a Jekyll created blog post on S3 :-)

I started a thread at the top level: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2999815

Maybe you could start a spreadsheet on Google Docs. :)

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