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Comment by ugjka | Hacker News Reader

I've moved my email and calendar off Google, stakes are just too fucking high. Also ditched Chrome for trusty Firefox. The only reason I have a Google account is just for Android and Youtube

Edit: also DDG for search

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Is there a good alternative for Google Voice? As in, a phone number that rings multiple phones, can work with SIP phones, and that shows up with a good reputation as a standard phone number?

I haven't been in love with GVoice since I degoogled my designated "mobile phone" (I've just been limping along without being able to respond to texts on the go), but haven't taken the leap to Voip.ms or Flowroute, due to the reputation problem (eg many banks' snake oil authentications reject "voip" numbers).

My tentative plan is to move my main longstanding "main number" to one of those VOIP providers, and move snake oil auths to either the SIM card in my "mobile phone", a separate SIM on a fixed cell modem, or perhaps just a new GVoice number (which only needs to receive, so interop is easy by forwarding to email).

You can build your own google voice with twilio.

I run my own little mini telco for myself and it’s both interesting and fun.

Admittedly, I am also forced to maintain a “2fa mule” to forward 2fa to email and twilio number but that’s all part of the fun :)

I assume Twilio has the same number metadata problems as Voip.ms and Flowroute? Or have they managed to negotiate better standing with other telcos?

Can you state what these problems are? I have voip.ms but haven't actually used it as my primary number for awhile. They have SMS (using their custom app) and VoiP using SIP. Its too bad native SIP support in android (google pixel) wasn't that great for me which is why i stopped using it

1. Numbers don't work for banks' snake oil auth, craigslist account signup, etc. Either silently fails or says the number cannot be used.

2. Calls (to an iPhone, at least) where the number isn't already in address book show up as "Spam Risk" rather than the phone number.

3. Have had some people unable to text a voip.ms number, eg from Comcast mobile.

I'm not trying to hate on them or anything. I'm a happy customer for what they are. I just think these are limitations of all consumer-facing libre-protocol VOIP services, that GVoice manages to sidestep due to Fi, but I'd love to be wrong.

FWIW I've found the Voip.ms Android SMS app a bit flaky.

All correct. A twilio number will also have imperfect reputation although I can't say where it ranks among all of those providers ...

So, again - my phone number is a twilio number and I use that for voice/sms/humans but my 2FA goes to a "2FA mule" that I keep in my office:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28251107

... and all of these phones are just MVNO sims that I purchase pseudonymously and can just be thrown away at any time.

I don't care about losing my phone or my SIM card.

I may have seen that thread, and it probably gave me the idea for my second option. Still, I've got to wonder about the relative hassle-insecurity of a cheap MVNO versus GVoice. Like sure Google has a bad rep, but at least they've got good common-case security properties. Whereas a lowest bidder MVNO is likely to have poor security to begin with, and poor customer service for cleaning up after the fact. It might still be worth it to try a GVoice number first for every service, then fall back to the mule. (although everpresent point against Google: they're better at exploiting surveillance data, in a way that an MVNO won't be)

"all of these phones" implies you have expanded to multiple mules? I presume for multiple accounts at the same service? Is there any indication that really works for eg making it so all your Google accounts don't get locked at once? Or are you doing it to undermine the use of phone numbers for cross-service surveillance association?

FWIW I haven't looked in a while, but the cheapest US consumer SIM I've found is H2O Wireless (on AT&T) at $10 per 3 months.

"Is there any indication that really works for eg making it so all your Google accounts don't get locked at once?"

I don't have any google accounts.

"Or are you doing it to undermine the use of phone numbers for cross-service surveillance association?"

I am doing it because I love tinkering with the telephone network.

I’ve done the same. The hard part is actually finding a Docs replacement. They’re almost all priced for enterprise.

While not a perfect replacement, I like hedge doc myself.

https://hedgedoc.org/

Is office not free? I much prefer office online to Google docs but we have to use google docs at work :( though the collab feature is much better in Google docs.

Here is a self hosted alternative with real time collaboration https://cryptpad.fr/

Not just Docs, it's Google Drive that I find hard to replace (Docs, Sheets, Draw, Slide, etc). The recent debacle with Legacy GSuite motivated me to pay for a Microsoft 365 account, and create a sync of my Google Drive to OneDrive, converting the proprietary Google format into Office format. Then I do a 3-2-1 backup of the OneDrive files. (Backing up the local Google Drive folder is no good, because all you get is a stub of the Google proprietary files.)

Then I moved most of my other Google services (e.g. Domains, Gmail, Calendar, Search, Chrome) off to other companies and products (e.g. Cloudflare, Fastmail, DDG, Firefox). I figure that every interaction with Google proportionally increases the probability that my account will be terminated. So I moved off Google to protect my Google Drive, which seems ironic.

The last Google service that I need to move off is Google Voice. I haven't done a lot of research on this yet. If anyone knows of a good alternative that provides SMS-to-email forwarding, I'd be interested.

At least with office 365 you can save to older, less apt to be excluded from formats like doc. Personally I save everything in the old doc/xls/ppt formats. I hope they keep them around for a while. Mostly these days though I just have a server at home that I can vnc into and use openoffice. All that stuff gets backed up to backblaze. it's not as nice as google or office365 but it's mine and I control it and I won't be revoking my account on an AI whim.

Why do you still use the non X office formats? They're far easier for other office suites to read as their not just a memory dump of internal office structures.

specific formats aside, rclone can give you portability across any storage-as-a-service providers

Just bite the bullet and accept that any free replacement you do find is also going to have its downsides. Decent stuff costs money to develop and maintain, if you're not paying then you're doing a deal with a devil somewhere along the line.

Oh, I'd prefer to be a paying customer.

The issue is price structure. Github and Dropbox are great examples where I can be a Pro user and invite free users to collaborate, and it works great.

What we're seeing is a trend towards pay per seat with extremely limited guest capabilities if they exist at all. That's generally okay for businesses where $20/user/month is a rounding error on salaries. It just doesn't work for personal use.

Zoho?

I use LaTeX ಠ_ಠ

Same here, also ditched Google Drive when they started to push the newest iteration of their Windows client.

I’ve been wanting to set up a home server, and then I can also ditch Google Photos and Calendar.

Imagine how nice it would be to just have an "YouTube account", that is not related/connected to any other Google Services. Now that I think about it, why would I even want to use the same account for Email, YouTube and Analytics? It would make a lot more sense for them to be completely separate.

I moved my work domain off Google, too, and Calendar has been a huge hassle. It keeps eating invites from other people using Google Calendar unless they explicitly opt to send an email invitation.

I did the same after I wanted to play around with an old Pixel phone and install a different OS on it. I realized I wasn't doing it because I was terrified of Google shutting down my account. I had email, photos, contacts, calendars, even TV and cell service with them that could be taken away at a moment's notice. That's just way too much in the hands of a highly automated company.

Now it's down to YouTube, and if Google wants to shut that down, I can live with it.

Firefox is not trusty. Having your email and calendar on Google is not a risk as long as you sync them so if something happens to your accounts that you can move them to another provider.

> Having your email and calendar on Google is not a risk as long as you sync them so if something happens to your accounts that you can move them to another provider.

No, that’s not true. In the case where google shuts down your email, you will lose every email sent to that account after the shut down, and you’ll need to find everything and everyone that might send email to youraccount@gmail.com. This is why having a separate domain is super important, you could switch the MX records with minimal interruption.

Yeah, I didn't say you shouldn't use your own custom domain I just said using Google for email isn't a huge issue. I suggest an anonymous email service for this reason while using a custom domain. Doesn't matter if they shutdown one email, you can just create a new one and change where the forwarding email in your relay.

   Having your email on Google is not a risk

That is like the highest risk I can think of. Losing future emails that are sent to that email, losing all connected accounts, losing access to services/websites they decide to send a confirmation mail

That is why you should add a custom domain. You have the same lockout issue with Outlook, ProtonMail, or any email service where you don't own the domain.

I misunderstood you then, "having your mail on google and syncing them" sounds like you still have a @gmail.com but taking backups. Having your own domain is indeed the safest, I do that actually

Yeah, the question is whether google makes sense as a mail provided once you've decided that you needed to pay because of that feature.

If you're a company and don't want to manually handle email provisioning? Sure, why not. If you're an individual, Google isn't great. You could have a decent feature set along with great customer support elsewhere.

With an email addy relay like SinpeLogin you don't have to pay Google for that feature.

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