Ask HN: Moving off of Google products
Ever since I had to add a public Google+ profile to my work Google Apps account (which we pay for) just to use Google Hangouts with more than one person, I have found it increasingly hard to remain a user of Google products. I should have seen it coming from the forced YouTube/Google+ upgrade, but for me the last straw was when Chrome installed a Desktop Notification menu bar icon in OS X without asking me, with no way to remove it, and no way to disable notifications for Google products. The very aggressive way that Google is shoving its ecosystem down my throat is no longer palatable, and I no longer want to participate or give them my data.
I've switched off of Chrome to Firefox/Safari, and although they're buggy or act in ways that are confusing (open 30 tabs in Safari and figure out the rightmost tab's behavior), they're fine as my daily browser.
Harder for me was to make the switch to DuckDuckGo as my search engine of choice, but except for Google Images or some trending news topic I'm mostly fine with DDG, especially now that I'm discovering lots of neat tips and tricks.
Tonight I'm having trouble switching off of Gmail to FastMail because Google is flagging FastMail's IMAP migration login attempts as "suspicious activity," but I already think I'll be fine with using FastMail as my new personal email provider (I don't use my personal email that much).
But there are other services that I'm not sure how to replace. Google Image search, YouTube, and Google Docs are harder for me to go off of, mostly because all-the-things are already in there and nowhere else. Any recommendations? What about replacements for other Google products?