I want to eventually move away, especially gmail and drive.
What are the alternatives that can be used with expectation that they will remain active for at least a decade ?
- Email: ProtonMail
- Contacts, Calendar, Online storage: NextCloud hosted by Hetzner (https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share)
- Phone: LineageOS (Android)
-- App stores: F-Droid for most apps and Aurora store for the occasional non F-Droid apps (like the ProtonMail client)
-- Maps: MagicEarth (not open source but privacy friendly and very featureful)
-- Messaging: Telegram FOSS
-- Contact & Calendar sync: DAVx
- Notes: Joplin (syncs with NextCloud and available on F-Droid as well)
- Search: DuckDuckGo
ProntonMail (with own domain) and the hosted NextCloud instance aren't free, but privacy comes with a price and I'm happy to pay for it. So far I'm very happy with the transition.
Though it's not as focused on driving, it seems. But may be good enough.
I haven't tried it much in the US.
The US should be pretty good for trails, reasonable for streets and highly variable for addresses and POIs.
One advantage of Organic Maps is that it integrates well with OpenStreetMap. As I live in a place where OSM coverage is pretty average, I have fun adding places I know through this application and make small contributions in my own way. It also does not collect any user data. Give it a try.
I have the luxury to live in central Europe, and here both are much, much closer in amount of detail.
Proton looks really neat too, I just don’t like the thought of not having platform-independent IMAP access. It’s certainly a sensible tradeoff for more security-minded folks though.
Fastmail is very quick to load and user-friendly, I don't miss Gmail at all.
I don't care that they haven't added meaningful new features in a long time, I don't care that they rearrange the UI every now and then, but breaking core functionality for no tangible reason is just unacceptable.
I switched to Gmail in 2008 because they cared about auto-saving drafts while other webmail just lost drafts when the session had expired and I clicked "send". Nowadays, I guess they mostly care about Material Design and streering me towards their latest clusterf**k of a chat/conference app.
$50 per year - custom domain, 30GB
$30 per year - no custom domain, no IMAP, 2GB (yes, 2GB!)
That’s some pricing!
The last thing you want is use an email that’s paid and not on your domain! Fastmail’s Basic paid plan is absurd not only price/feature wise, it’s useless just for not letting custom domain use.
I would rather stick to alternatives.
I had the same idea when I first learned of them (and price was even lower) but after doing the same math it occured to me what:
a) they DO have clients who are happy to use their domains (and they have a lot of them)
b) ~$4/m is absurdingly cheap for the service they provide.
c) it is the casual "we prefer what you pay us $N, but if you insist there is a cheaper alternative (with some restrictions) for $M"
And finally, I checked my plan and I'm still on Business Lite, $20/y ($1.66/m) and 750MB of storage. Sure, each couple of years I go in and cull the old irrelevant messages, but even with a bunch of messages from providers up from 2014 I still use only 372MB, 50% of my message box.
Sure, I'm not using it a lot for a correspondence with an actual people, but I'm pretty fine with it, particulary because I like what I don't have 9999+ notifications from social networks about someone's birthdays etc.
I'm really happy with fastmail. Anything sent to anything@anything.mydomain goes in my inbox, and I can apply filtering based on those. It also lets me generate @fastmail.com emails if I don't want to expose my domain. It also scrapes my ~5 old gmail addresses and copies those emails into my inbox. It's awesome.
For me this isn't about the $20, but more about making do with less. If I had a higher quota, the only thing it would allow me to do is accumulate more trash email! I do agree with you though that for $30/yr, they should allow custom domains.
I for sure would love to read a full length article about it.
I'm definitely up to share my experience and write a full article about this. Hopefully in the coming month when I find some time :-)
It's dreadful at driving directions, and it's not like I live somewhere weird. It was getting me lost even in a town with a 30k+ student state university.
I've been using Magic Earth for several years, its getting better and better.
Its closed source, but privacy orientated apparently.
Google was returning what I wanted, not what I needed.
They have a decent selection of relatively modern phones. They will sell you a phone with LineageOS and microG pre-installed ( CalyxOS or GrapheneOS also ). They offer a super smooth buying experience and they are also quick to ship.
I've purchased two phones from them and both have exceeded my expectations. Another reason I like them is because the owners put out a lot of excellent content on keeping good privacy practices and combating invasive advertising.
My only complaint is that I wish they offered more phone models. It's a small thing though. I'm just happy they're available in the USA where it's becoming nearly impossible to purchase a smartphone that doesn't have a carrier-enforced restriction on flashing the bootloader.
https://www.fsf.org/resources/webmail-systems
I switched from Gmail to Posteo when I came across this link. While the interface is really basic, it works for me and it also helps me support smaller businesses.
-- Messaging: how about Conversations? It's pretty out-of-the-boxy. But I have to admit, no working voice calls.
First, philosophy: this article resonated so much with me that I made the brave step of deleting my big tech accounts and switching to Linux: https://medium.com/hackernoon/leaving-apple-and-google-my-ee...
Then, execution. This site will help you to find user-friendly alternatives to your spyware apps/OSs/services: https://www.privacytools.io/
I am now with a setup that maximizes privacy and giving money to ethical companies: Phone OS: LineageOS and /e/ Desktop/Laptop: Debian and Linux Mint Browser Mobile: Bromite Browser Desktop: LibreWolf (firefox fork oriented to privacy) Maps and GPS mobile: OsmAnd Mobile app store: F-Droid, Aurora Store Search Engine: DuckduckGo, SearX Email: Posteo (1€/month) VPN: Mullvad (5€/month) Online drive: NextCloud-based service ie /e/ foundation
Once I researched the above and checked the companies/projects are trustworthy, I started using them with surprisingly low bumps in the road. For mobile OS I went radical and didn't even install microG (a package to enable G services so some apps work well). I still can use my favorite apps, including banking (although if you root your phone you might have issues)
Read more here: - https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivacyGuides/comments/pnhn4a/rpriv... - https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivacyGuides/comments/pnh9n8/what_...
I used to use syncthing to maintain backups and syncing, but eventually just gave into iCloud as a compromise. Setting up and maintaining syncthing on wife and kids devices became a pain.
DuckDuckGo for search. Dropping down to google when I’m stuck. Honestly I’ve found google worse for technical topics due to all the junk websites that recycle content.
You’ll be fighting against the current trying to ditch google with an android phone! I’m sure it’s possible though.
A great benefit of de googling (and also dropping most social media) is that I am barely exposed to ads at all! It’s is shocking using other peoples devices now ahah.
Google showed results that explain Hibernate's expression language isn't sufficient to express them and explainers on how to drop down to native queries.
DDG showed me how to hibernate my windows PC.
It’s honestly the only thing I still use Google for at this point.
This might be just a consequence of cutting the feed of data into Google to personalise from other sources, though. Perhaps people who've thought they've been equivalent for a longer period were ahead of me on that one.
I use duckduckgo almost exlusively and I don't have any trouble finding what I'm looking for
I thought at first it was russians talking about hacking foreign banks, supermarkets etc. Then i started noticing links about doctors, etc and i realized something is off.
This is a very recent development. I'll prob have to drop ddg for something else...
I use paid Seafile hosting for file sync. I haven't tried Syncthing, but the Seafile clients all seem to work very smoothly.
I still don’t find much better than Google for searching but I guess Bing and DDG are at least a lot better than nothing. I do feel like my user satisfaction with Google search goes down a little bit every year.
Depending on why you’re moving away from Google these may not be options you’ll consider. But if your opposition isn’t to big tech in particular but to just Google give MS products a try if you haven’t in awhile.
At the other end of the scale, you get get a free Office365 enterprise license if you sign up to try out MS Graph Explorer. 90 days but they've renewed it a couple times now, you just have to log in and use it every once in a while.
Tip: If you have more than 1 MS account your computer starts to get confused. In chrome open a guest window to log in to different MS accounts.
Although Microsoft and Apple win points for not having ads their a primary profit mechanism, they unfortunately use the same strategy as Google: creating walled ecosystems that are very hard to leave. MS in particular has shown how aggressively anti-consumer they will be in the right conditions.
- mail-in-a-box for email
- NextCloud (included in mail-in-a-box) for contacts, calendars, and files
- LineageOS for MicroG for Android
- OpenStreetMap for maps
- DuckDuckGo for search
- Firefox as internet browser
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
What makes you consider google to be privacy conscious? Aren't they just scanning your emails 24/7 to profile you for advertising?
A "Data Disruption Warrant" allows them to add, copy, delete or modify your data. "Account Takeover Warrant" will remove your access to an account but still allow them full access
As for advertisement surveillance, I'd have to take Fastmail's word, whereas with a domestic provider, there's the GDPR that is a lot harder to evade for them than for some Australian company.
Like sibling said, doesn't Australia have a pretty bad track record with respect to data protection (especially data owned by foreigners?) If ease of use were the #1 priority I'd stick with Google, I've never had a single issue in over a decade with them.
> What makes you consider google to be privacy conscious?
I probably didn't make that clear enough, but I don't consider them that, hence why I'm looking for something more privacy-conscious than Google (ideally not just a little more but I'm willing to make some compromises if that means I can keep using iOS Mail and the like)
Who are you looking for privacy from? Unless you use gpg/pgp it doesn't matter who you are using for email hosting, a state actor will get in. (Btw, proton etc are all pointless unless you only ever plan to email fellow proton users)
So then we are left with privacy from commercial 3rd parties. And I trust fastmail to offer me that, given that their customers pay for the service, I don't think it is worth it for them to also sell my data.
Will check out gandi.net though!
It's a no-frills, secure setup for a decent price. I definitely recommend mailbox.org.
For sending email, I setup an SMTP relay via Amazon SES. If you verify your domain, you can send an email from any alias.
This combination works great!
1: https://posteo.de/en/site/faq "Can I use Posteo with my own domain?"
Email: Tutanota Calendar: Tutanota Messaging: Signal Phone: GrapheneOS Maps: OsmAnd~ Apps: F-Droid or Aurora Store Mobile Browser: Vanadium (Chromium-based) Desktop Browser: Brave (Chromium-based) YouTube client: NewPipe
The last three are iffy as far as de-Google-img goes. I used Firefox for years but recently I find it unusable. Every year more websites are broken in Firefox and it never gets better despite bug reports. There also isn't really an alternative to YouTube's content unless the creator you follow also posts on Odysee.
I appreciate your quick response though, shows that you guys are on top of things.
Nextcloud partnered with providers and they give 2GB instances for free, allegedly. If you need more, you can check https://github.com/nextcloud/providers#providers
Buy an /e/ OS phone: https://esolutions.shop/
There are also third party sellers, like "Liberate your tech", who sell phones with GrapheneOS preinstalled.
Regarding their stability; Posteo is going strong since 2009, Nextcloud as a project 2010. For mobile devices I'd look at 3-5 year periods, and I feel confident that /e/ OS and GrapheneOS will be around for that time. Even if they don't, the situation is not that different from owning an Android that's not updated anymore, and also usually you can sell the phone on the used market and buy a new one that's still supported.
I've also had good results with DDG for most things search. I know people say the results are worse, and on some occasions they are, but mostly it's perfectly serviceable in my experience.
For video conferencing I've been using a mix of Jitsi Meet and meet.coop (a big blue button instance that I have access to through my membership in social.coop, which is good for social media).
For chat (including phone calls and SMS through https://jmp.chat) I use https://conversations.im, the client costs money but the service just went free unless you want to use a custom domain.
My phone is running Lineage OS using F-Droid for an app store. I don't like F-Droid very much for reasons that don't matter here (that might have been fixed since the last time I looked into it for all I know), but it is a perfectly good alternative so I recommend it in the absence of anything better.
For maps I've been using Organic (https://organicmaps.app/). It uses Open Street map data so at first a lot of places I wanted to navigate to weren't there, but I added all the places I go regularly to the map and now it works pretty well.
For some of the services, your own privacy measures may not matter one bit. Take email for example, you may self host it, or use a privacy oriented provider, but it doesn't help one bit if you recipient is on gmail or outlook, so one could argue that attempting to privacy secure email is in vain. You can of course use GPG, but that requires the receiver to publish keys, which not very many people do.
I've self hosted for a couple of decades, but some years ago i decided i no longer wanted to be our resident sysadm, and instead moved everything to the cloud. I went from a proxmox cluster and a couple of NAS boxes spinning at home, to nothing spinning, and no open ports in the firewall.
We now use regular cloud services (Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud, etc), and instead use Cryptomator (https://cryptomator.org/) to encrypt everything before sending it to the cloud.
For specific apps we use
- Joplin for notes (or just ios notes)
- Signal for messaging (though in reality we use quite a few clients, as it highly depends on what your recipient uses)
- MXRoute for mail / contacts
- DuckDuckGo for searching.
- Cryptomator on top of whatever cloud storage the individual prefers.
- Photos, here we chose the easy path, and simply use the integration offered by our phones, which in our case means iPhones, so iCloud.
Shared webhosting is still a thing and comes with the best of two worlds. Not expensive and professionals take care of the system under the hood.
- nextcloud for photos/drive - bitwarden with vaultwarden backend for passwords - self hosted Firefox Sync for everything else - syncthing for outlying file sharing - jottacloud for high capacity storage dump (rclone is your friend)
Probably forgot something
I found it very rewarding to put my money towards companies that are aligned with my priorities (be it privacy or other) even if there were free alternatives.
You posted a URL as if that was self-evident commentary.
Run it yourself!
Get yourself a solid hosting company with shared webhosting. For Germany, hetzner or all-inkl would be my choice.
A hetzner "Level 1" shared webhosting for 1,90 €/month will come with an included TLD of your choice. Use that to host your own mailboxes. 10 GB webspace should be good for that, too.
Then install a NextCloud instance on that webhost. Add a hetzner "Storage Box", 3,45 €/month will give you 1 TB of space which can be mounted into the NextCloud through a free plugin.
That way you have mail and your own cloud for 5,50 €/month for as long as you pay the bill...
I get where you're coming from. But, most people just simply don't have the appetite to run their own mail. What we need are: paid services that are reasonably reliable, secure, respect your privacy, and provide human-based customer support.
PS: I myself use Hetzner (for non-email stuff), and a hosted NextCloud service - both are great :)
So, for hardware
- Workstations: Linux
- Mobile: /e/OS [1]
For software:
- GDrive -> Syncthing for the documents, LibreOffice on workstations, simple document viewers on mobile
- Email: My own domain, service provided by namecheap, costs ~20€/year.
- Contacts, Calendar -> Syncthing to synchonize the files between the devices, and DecSync [2] as a calendar provider on thunderbird (workstation) and k-mail (mobile)
- App Store: F-Droid for most software, and the odd exception (Berlin ticket for public transportation) that is not F/OSS I use the /e/OS store (which proxies some of the apps from Google into their own store)
- Maps: MagicEarth (works well, uses OSM data, can do navigation decently and allows to choose download maps to keep offline). One of these days I will try again to self-host a tiling server, but I'm not sure what I would do for navigation.
- Messaging: Matrix/Element is my main client, I also have XMPP. Both are hosted by communick, the "professional managed service" that I run [3]. I also have Telegram (FOSS client) on mobile, but I've been meaning to implement the bridge on communick so that I can ditch the client. I use hangouts only on the computer if and only if the other party is not available on the preferred methods.
- Search: Brave search is working well. I preferred Brave over DDG because Brave is building their own index. If you think your queries are not giving you good results, you can turn on "Google mixing", where they make a (proxied) query to Google and show their results mixed with their own.
[0]: https://raphael.lullis.net/thinking-heads-are-not-in-the-clo...
[1]: https://e.foundation
Banking Apps are a different story. At least my bank in Germany is not supporting non-Google phones yet. I'm keeping my previous phone (Nokia 6.1) around mostly for this reason.
If you have any need to use Microsoft products for work or home (gaming), then it's worth getting an Office 365 subscription, since it also gives you a terabyte of space on OneDrive, which syncs pretty seamlessly on Windows.
You can de-Google a big chunk of your Android if you don't mind using Microsoft instead. Outlook for email, OneDrive for sync, Edge for browsing, OneNote for notes etc.
Email was really the only thing I made heavy use of: Gandi, who I already pay to keep my domain registered, offers 3 GB mailboxes for free. This works fine for me since I archive and delete old mail annually. You can purchase 50 GB mailboxes for a few dollars per month.
For file storage, I host my own NextCloud instance and handle (offline, geographically redundant) backups myself. I also pay for a MEGA account and back up critically important documents there.
My primary phone runs Android 6 (terrible, I know) and I haven't had issues using it while not logged into a Google account. The artificially limited capacity of Google Maps' search history is a disappointing dark pattern, but that's about it. I plan on switching to a PinePhone eventually.
I do worry about the usability of newer Android versions without a Google account. Not sure what's changed, do you have to sign in to use current Android phones?
Does anyone has thoughts on this?
Great non-Google services I pay for are ProtonMail, Fastmail, iCloud, and Office-365.
I have played around with self-hosting options, but decided to just use Cloud services, but don’t rely on any single vendor.
How would you rate the two if one were to use just one of those?
Any experience with Zoho, if so would love your thoughts on that too..
[0] https://www.zoho.com/mail/help/gsuite-to-zoho-mail-migration...
Zoho Email has been very reliable, spam protection has been satisfactory. Some minor things have bitten me, thier Zoom competitor only records audio, not video, the spreadsheets are sometimes slow to recalculate I trigger with F9 more than I'd like. But the workdrive has been on parity with GDrive, and the word Processor is more fully featured.
Zoho are very responsive for support and you do interact with a human. My "One" suite includes email, calendar, Gdocs competitor, Gdrive competitor, and also pretty much everything I need to run my small business (books, CRM, website, appointments, webinars, courses, etc..)
If you just don't want to risk being locked out its more important to keep access to your data these would be the steps:
- Get your own domain for email. If google locks you out you can just point it to somewhere else.
- Set google takeout to make monthly backups (automatically) of your email, photos and so on to google drive.
- Install desktop google drive on your computer. Set it to fully mirror all your files locally/offline. Then if google locks you out you will still have access to your files and photo/email backups. Bonus points for having a desktop mail app that keeps your email locally.
The lockout problem is not unique to google, can happen with most providers.
If you use an email provider that lets you use your own custom domain, and use that as your primary email address on all of those sites and one day the provider decides to purge you off their site, the domain still belongs to you, so you can jump to a new service, point it at the same address, and all your internet accounts are none the wiser.
To make the transition easier I started by forwarding all Gmail emails to Tutanota and I've been slowly updating my accounts to the new email. The plan is to eventually delete my Google accounts completely.
If you're comfortable with email clients, you can even use mailbox.org as a dumb mail-drop location and fetch everything locally via tools such as `mbsync`. Then you can use a mail client your choice (Thunderbird, Mutt, etc) to read/respond.
If you decide to go the self-hosted route, it's trivial to deploy with searx(ng)-docker. Being a meta-search engine, it can pull results from Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, dictionaries, torrent sites, etc; this gives it a degree of customisability that traditional search engines don't have.
I'll also mention Whoogle, which serves as a libre front-end to Google, although it doesn't currently support any other search engines.
- emails? They are normally valuable tool and personal stuff, they must not be outside your control as much as possible so GMail or Proton change nothing if you use them with their webmail. Just buy a domain, choose a hosted mail service, just because host one yourself is not that easy these days, sync or better grab your remote inbox to a homeserver and use your mail locally in your desktop. The local part means sync against your server the entire maildir, use a local MUA, with good search, tagging etc capabilities, my personal choice is notmuch, to sync mail muchsync, to grab mail fetchmail+MailDrop (but you might like OfflineIMAP or MBSync). Webmail served by your homeserver (i.e. MailPie or Modoboa or even the simple RoundCube) as a last resort if you aren't at your desktop;
- calendar/agenda? Similarly, personally I use org-mode, far more powerful than modern calendar, but again you might prefer different things, thou local and synced not centrally served.
- Drive? To share files there are various options from classic WebDAV to third party services no reason to be tied to one in particular if that's not yours, the rest of Drive is not really a thing IMVHO
- search? Just use Google Search is not more evil than any other player, there is no real open choice there, YaCy while have a public distributed network count just too few participants to be an alternative and the web is the web, you can't run your own.
- Maps? Again not much real alternatives, a PND is good enough for car navigation, for the rest there are very few other maps services but none as powerful as Maps just due to the scale. OSM is hyper-good in limited areas, very lacking elsewhere so not a real option.
- notes? The best I know are again Emacs/org-mode/org-roam etc combo, TiddlyWiki with a daemon to serve it might be another option, Zim another more limited but still light and classic for certain users.
Looking for alternatives in terms of substituting a player with another is a game loosed from start and does not solve anything: companies are not "good" or "evil" they just follow their interest, some might be less friendly then others, but interests in the game remain the same.
register your own domain name, either for personal or professional purposes
take some basic security precautions on your domain registrar account, use a long complex password that's not used for any other service anywhere else on the internet, and set up some form of 2FA for logins as well.
control your own authoritative DNS zonefile and choose where to set your MX records
choose a 3rd party email service such as the other recommendation here, fastmail, and set the MX records, SPF and DKIM appropriately
I have a question about domains, for whoever might be able to answer. I've had my own domain for a few years, a .se domain (only because it's .se and my middle name ends in that, so I was able to make the whole thing read like my name but with a dot in it)
This is the Swedish TLD, which doesn't require you be a citizen to register. Is there any chance that the requirements for a TLD can change in the future and revoke my ability to own it? i.e. they start requiring you be a Swedish citizen to own a .se domain? Cause as it stands I just use the domain for my portfolio website which I could change whenever I want, but if I start tying my entire internet identity to that by registering it as my email everywhere, then it seems just as risky as using a gmail account that could get banned at any time.
Yes it's theoretically possible the Swedish authorities who control .se could do something else policy wise in the future.
I suppose regardless, if it ever actually happened, it's not like you wake up one day and lose your domain. There would probably be time to buy a new domain and point all your accounts there before your next renewal.
So yes, The Swedish government could revoke your domain because they're the government.
if somebody were to ask "what's the least politically stable nation on earth right now?", libya would certainly rank in the top 10
I'd sayx it is not really probable that you'd would immediately be nuked off your tld. And I also can't see the Swedes pulling this move.
yes, see the EU commission forcing new rules on the company running the .eu tld after brexit
> British citizens had their .eu domains suspended on January 1, 2021 for three months and then deleted on March 1, 2021 after a grace period to allow EU/EEA citizens to update the registration information to show their non-UK address. This is the first case of its kind where an institution managing an internet Top-level domain has withdrawn domains en masse for an entire country.
However, this seems like it wasn't actually a change in domain registration requirements. It was the fact that the peoples' citizenship status was changed. The original requirements[2] of .eu domains from launch was it was only for EU citizens, so it was really just keeping in line with its original requirements.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.eu
[2] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_06_...
but they deleted domains people had legitimately purchased prior to usual expiry (in violation of existing contracts with the registrants)
standard EU commission pettiness
(meanwhile even the soviet union's .su is still usable)
then things like this
Has been working fine so far.
Before that I tried de-Googled Android and the experience wasn't great. Many of the alternatives can ostensibly do what the Big Tech product does, but there are bizarre pitfalls that break the experience. Stuff like OSMAnd having no business names and taking literally 15 minutes to map a route across town.
A few things come to mind for me:
- 2-factor auth (SMS or app based).
- Banking (in the UK now a lot of online purchases must also be verified through the banks app).
- Navigating in your city (public transport + just finding places by foot).
- Anything else you've come across that assumes everyone has a smartphone.
Also, what benefits have you found through ditching the smartphone?
I still have an old Blackberry for SMS 2FA.
>- Banking (in the UK now a lot of online purchases must also be verified through the banks app).
We have an Android tablet at home for Chromecast. I just use that. When we're out, I don't tend to make online purchases. When push comes to shove, PayPal is a plan C.
>- Navigating in your city (public transport + just finding places by foot).
I'm one of those people who always knows where North is, and which directions main roads run in. I guess I'm just doing whatever it is that people did 50 years ago?
>- Anything else you've come across that assumes everyone has a smartphone.
I usually just ignore the COVID check-ins if they are phone only. Only one person has stopped me and immediately didn't care when I showed them my dumbphone. Apart from that, literally nothing has caused an issue.
>Also, what benefits have you found through ditching the smartphone?
I am not constantly plugged into an online hate machine. I can look around and realise that, actually, people aren't all that shit after all.
I also went back to Dropbox and love it. No Google drive client for Linux is bizarre.
Alternatives to Android:
1. Librem - https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
2. Pine - https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/
[Disclaimer - I haven't used these devices.]
Platform on user's hosting provider for deploying private services, managed via mobile application.
The app runs you through clearly defined steps on how to purchase the server, domain, and register everything together.
You control the lot.
The NixOS script is available on their repo to view, and fork yourself too.
Their support is top notch, I've had many conversations with them, they have always helped me out. https://t.me/selfprivacy
From my conversations, and chats, it's run by someone that has poured a lot of personal money and time into the project. They are truly passionate with privacy, self determination, teaching others, and helping the community.
You have corrected my assumption, thank you.
You could take their NixOS script and run it on your own Raspberry Pi 4, I guess?
I use YT, Google Search, and Google Meet. You cannot escape the first two, and the later is a display of professionalism for me as a freelancer.
[1] https://jmap.io/
[2] https://fastmail.blog/open-technologies/jmap-new-email-open-...
Casual use - ProtonMail
Git and friends - Nixnet
Use FairEmail on Android and Geary (sometimes Aerc) on Linux.
Using it as a google drive alternative though but I'd like to move to a solution with client-side encryption. Should actually be doable with the webdav that fastmail exposes and rclone: https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000277882-Re...
And I miss google sheets.
Google Chrome —> Brave
Gmail —> ProtonMail
Google Docs —> Notion
They just don't want google.