Adventures in de-Googling
www.wavebeem.com
Trying to remove Google from my life

My problem switching off of gmail is that I’d really like to start moving to an alias-based approach (so, you know, lemmy@maya.land for Lemmy emails, etc.) but this then conflates two issues so I solve neither.

I wish Google Takeout were required to maintain consistent formats so people could develop tools against it. I could make a lot of progress by pulling out the decade of history I have with them and not maintaining more than a couple months of data inside their stuff at any given time.

  • airikr
    41·
    4 years ago

    “I strongly recommend Discord for most chat needs”

    But then you’re being controlled by another spyware, namely Discord. How about LINE? I use Telegram. Nuff’ said. And Google Calendar then? I use fruux.com.

    Microsoft bought SwiftKey years ago, so expect Microsoft tracking you from there. I use FlorisBoard instead.

    FastMail are based in Australia which are obayed to listen to the laws there. If a court demands FastMail to show them your email, they are forced to do that by law. I have used FastMail and loved them, but that forced me to choose Posteo instead.

    When it comes to Google Photos, I have had a hard time find a very good replacement. That service are too darn good! But luckily, I found Stingle Photos via F-Droid last month. Stingle Photos can be seen as a copy of Google Photos, but with end-to-end encryption + open source. Currently only to Android since the service are very new, but are currently in development for iOS as well. A desktop version are planned too.

    How about Google Maps then? I use OpenStreetMap and OsmAnd+ from F-Droid. But I occasionaly use Google Maps when OpenStreetMap can’t help me.

    Google Translate? I use nicetranslator.com. Unfortunately, not open source and it appears to get the translations from a third-party service. But it is still a good replacement for Google Translate.

    To view more, go to https://airikr.me/services/lang:en to see my replaced services.

    • clmbmb
      1·
      4 years ago

      Stingle Photos

      It looks nice, but I would like to host my own server, which at the moment is not supported, which is a shame.

      • airikr
        1·
        4 years ago

        Nice with open source, but that Japanese keyboard are Google’s own keyboard with Gboard. I wouldn’t surprised if they track you from within the app. If not, sweet!

        Will check out Dialect. Thank you for the suggestion.