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keraf

I moved away from Google a few years ago. I'm using the following alternatives:

- 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.

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For anyone who wants to give LineageOS a try but can't/won't figure out how to jailbreak your phone to install it, check out https://privatephoneshop.com/

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.

An alernative to Magic Earth would be Organic Maps. https://organicmaps.app/

Though it's not as focused on driving, it seems. But may be good enough.

I use both as I find the trails on Organic Maps easier to follow, while Magic Earth works better in cities. This is with the default map types. There might be a setting I could toggle to give me the best of both in one app.

I haven't seen much mention of Maps.Me, but it's another OSM-based android app I've heard good things about from Europeans and enjoyed while traveling in South America.

I haven't tried it much in the US.

Organic Maps is a fork of maps.me that was started after maps.me got bought.

The US should be pretty good for trails, reasonable for streets and highly variable for addresses and POIs.

Organic Maps is the "original" maps.me. Though highly rated, maps.me changed ownership a few times and in between had removed lot of the original features. I believe at that time the original developers of maps.me launched Organic Maps, even though the changes mentioned above have now been reversed.

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.

These apps are pretty much not useable in rest of the world.

OpenStreetMap data is probably the best geographic data you’ll find all around the world. Which region are you speaking about?

India.

Honest question: Is Google Maps much better than OpenStreetMap in India?

I have the luxury to live in central Europe, and here both are much, much closer in amount of detail.

ProtonMail has abysmally small storage space if you receive attachments in mail frequently.

Fastmail is much cheaper if you need many gigs of storage, but you don't get the encryption Proton offers.

On the upside, Fastmail is the one e-mail service that I have tested that is actually more comfortable to use than Gmail. How they manage to incorporate practically every feature I could dream of while offering a totally neat, snappy, intuitive interface across platforms is just impressive. (Testing right now and planning to move there from Gmail.)

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.

I switched from Gmail to Fastmail years ago (it only takes a few minutes of you own your domain) and whenever I have to use Gmail (for work) it seems slow and bloated.

Fastmail is very quick to load and user-friendly, I don't miss Gmail at all.

Indeed, I have wanted to switch away from Gmail for a long time, especially because of the stories of randomly terminated accounts, but the straw that broke the camel's back was that Gmail somehow managed to break the compose window: when I select/replace/delete text using the keyboard or do undo/redo, sometimes there are weird glitches that creep me out.

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.

I switched from Gmail to Fastmail a few months ago and it’s been great. Don’t miss Gmail at all.

And the Fastmail mobile apps are better than the Gmail mobile apps. Way better. It's crazy.

am interested, elaborate

Fastmail doesn’t allow custom domains on it’s first tier paid plan, does it?

$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.

$30 / 12 = $2.5

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 initially bought the Fastmail $50 plan for personal and a 2nd for business. After getting everything transferred from Gmail, I realized that I only had 3GB of email stored at Google after over 10 years, and most of that I never looked at. So as an experiment, I converted the personal account back to a $30 account with the 2GB limit. My focus is on keeping my Inbox nearly empty except for actually pending things. FM says my storage is 6% full and I'm using 0.1GB of 2GB, but even that is just trash. I have the Trash folder set to autopurge email after 1 year and think I won't ever run out of space. And if I do, I can just delete the trash earlier.

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.

Yeah, the $30 plan doesn't meet my needs for the same reasons. I don't mind paying $50 though so it's not a problem.

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.

ProtonMail is just PGP, nothing special about it.

While Proton is a common recommendation and I do use their VPN which is good, I would also urge people to look at alternative providers. This is a decent list.

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.

If you are using ProtonMail, you might want to check out their Proton Calendar. Still waiting for Proton Drive (beta) apps to see if it might partially replace Google Drive or Dropbox.

I've been looking at their other services but for now I'm happy using NextCloud, which provides more than just calendar and file storage. I also have phone tracking (so I can send my real time location to my relatives when driving and visualize the places I've been) and an RSS aggregator. Additionally, I'm not locking myself into another service provider. I'm still open to the idea of moving to another e-mail provider some day even though I'm happy with ProtonMail's service so far.

-- Search: DuckDuckGo They've become more and more bolitically biased and I'd recommend to move away even from them. There are searx and MetaGer.

-- Messaging: how about Conversations? It's pretty out-of-the-boxy. But I have to admit, no working voice calls.

You must have learned a lot of things that might prove useful to other people who might want to do the same transition.

I for sure would love to read a full length article about it.

It was quite a roller coaster to move to alternative services, and also giving up on all social media. But after a while you get used to things and find handy alternatives (like MagicEarth for maps, this app is great!). It feels liberating and I'm more at peace knowing I'm in control of my data. I keep reading these anxiety inducing Google account terminations for years, they also motivated my move (in addition to the privacy benefits). Sure, this could happen to me to with the service providers I use, but at least they have human point of contacts and all my data is backed up and ready to move to another services.

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 :-)

I moved to DuckDuckGo as my default search engine in the past couple of weeks but a few days ago, I had gone back to google search because the search results are much better. I really wanted to move away from google but the service is just much greater compared to the alternatives.

I had the opposite experience.

Google was returning what I wanted, not what I needed.

DuckDuckGo isn't trustable either. The only benefit to using them is just changing google's market share at your own expense

You guys should try Brave Search (I'm not affiliated, just a user). If you like the speed of Chromium and the Blink engine, but you're dissatisfied with the Firefox/DDG combination, it's particularly good.

Organic Maps is good, especially if you like hiking, and is on F-Droid

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/app.organicmaps/

Any particular reason to avoid OpenStreetMaps? Vs MagicEarth

I haven't tested MagicEarth, but never have I spent as much time miserably lost as when I spent a very determined month trying to use OSMAnd+ (the main AOSP OSM client, at least as far as I knew at the 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.

MagicEarth is based on OSM and their navigation is great, both for driving and walking (haven't tried cycling). I even got better routes suggested when driving vs Google Maps (I compared with a friend using GMaps, he switched to MagicEarth after that :-) ). The only time it messed up was by suggesting a non-existent walking path down a hill in Kiev, which resulted in me rolling down and slicing my arm open, nothing to serious though. Overall I'm happy enough with it to not spend more time looking for other alternatives. If anyone has a better alternative, I'm always listening.

I'm not sure openstreetmaps has a good driving experience?

I've been using Magic Earth for several years, its getting better and better.

Its closed source, but privacy orientated apparently.

and has anyone inspected what they both do on Wireshark etc?

ProtonMail's UI is way too slow and bloated. Their privacy values are dubious and generally more expensive. I've been using FastMail is fantastic.

old.protonmail.com is the way to go with ProtonMail's UI. Their new UI is a mess and not configurable. In old. you get a place to write your own CSS to configure the UI as you see fit.

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