You must log in or # to comment.
Should be said that some alternative search sites, such as Ecosia, share some of your information with their upstream search providers which does include Google.
How do they list Nextcloud as an alternative to Google Drive but not to the Google office apps? LibreOffice is not really a substitute, Nextcloud Office/Collabora is.
I’m using Gmail as an email client. I tell Gmail to go to fetch emails from my other accounts and so I have unified email. I don’t use @gmail.com as my primary address.
Problem: from today Google discontinued the feature and they warned me only yesterday.
Which webmail has almost feature parity with Gmail?
I need filters and fetching emails from multiple accounts. I have a dedicated server so the part of fetching email can be done from an external program
Kreate, Musify and Harmony Music are all great alternatives to YT Music
Are we doing ads now here? And are we, like, OK with it now?
Bruh chill a lot of these are FOSS
Anyone knows of a google lens translation alternative? I use it to share memes with a friend who doesn’t know English without having too manually replace text (these days it’s pretty good with context).
Ideally I would love to self host a thing that would do that, I don’t think it would be too complicated to vibe-code some self hosted translator plugged into a image to text reader/replacer or however you’d call that… But the fact that it sounds simple to vibecode makes me think it either already exists or is way more complicated than it sounds.
Why would you want it to be a server instead of an app just running on the phone, that can work offline?
this is a helpful image. thanks for sharing
What about for google maps?
This is like switching from Walmart to 15 other stores just to buy the same stuff. It’s going to be extremely difficult to convince anyone to make this jump.
It’s a actually harder because whoops, three years later you try to log into a service and it asks for a verification code sent to your Gmail address that you no longer have access to, oh well.
I did it already many years ago. You dont have to purposely loose all your old accesses. You can secure them and abandon them.
It happened once in 10y that I had to go back to recover 1 email from my google account but it was for something stupid that I could have avoided.
The hard part could be WhatsApp in Europe. I abandoned it the day after it was bought by facebook
Tell me what motivated you to go through that?
It’s more like switching to 15 other specialized stores which all value one’s privacy as opposed to the one which does everything and leverages its user data for maximum profit. No offence but comments like yours serve no purpose other than to impede non-tech-savvy people’s digital empowerment.
Many of the services depicted here aren’t really in reach for the average user and that is a problem we cannot ignore. People aren’t too stupid to realize that switching E-mail addresses requires planning, but there are many hurdles that pave the way from something like Google Photos towards Immich, imho the most significant app category up there.
So unfortunately you are correct. Transitions like that are extremely difficult especially after the decision has been made. Which makes it all the more important that we do not paint a picture of doom and gloom when the price of inaction is de-facto surveillance.
No offence but comments like yours serve no purpose other than to impede non-tech-savvy people’s digital empowerment.
I would argue that empowerment is more associated with capability rather than privacy or social justice (Whatever reason people are protesting Google); and having an all in one stop is incredibly convenient, and thus capable.
Sounds like the type of person who would buy a smart toaster and give Google even more intimate data they can use to predict you.
I keep a librewolf browser with a profile named BS that I use for logging into these services. You could do something like that to log into these services once every few months to keep it active until you’re ready to completely let go.
And btw, most of these services are open source. Although it would have been nice to see peertube on there
This is an ad. At least tuta marked it but that doesn’t make it way better.
All YouTube “options” are YouTube frontends. All android “alternatives” are android - which isn’t the guides fault as there are none in my opinion. Still unserious from my point of view.
It’s once more a catch all “guide” that doesn’t guide but simply mentions enough popular alternatives to get popularity.
they even listed calyx which is currently taking a long nap and is not secure
And as mentioned elsewhere, many cited alternatives are not degoogled at all.
And once you go that way you should go one step further and look for open source alternatives. I’m pretty sure some listed aren’t that either.
There are better curated, less biased lists out there.
Literally the first I’m hearing of Tuta.
Are they legit?
A Canadian law enforcement member accused them of being a honeypot. They’ve denied it. You’ll have to make up your own mind.
https://gizmodo.com/tuta-email-denies-connection-to-intelligence-services-1851022465
It’s not perfect, but I chose them over proton because I was able to get my first.last name. I haven’t had any issues so far over the last few years.
One of the biggest things is you have to use their client, no 3rd party clients like thunderbird.
Don’t move accounts straight away. They ban people with no appeal in the first couple of days if account is sniffed as suspicious. Also 6 months inactivity gets you deleted
They made this pretty sweet advertisement!
They’re legit and I’ve been on their paid plan for a few months now. I don’t like the UX of their app. Often feels slow and laggy and outdated. Probably will switch to Proton or something else when my 1 year plan ends.
Proton has almost the same feel and layout.
Yes. No issues.
“Oh hey, an alternative to Google Translate!”
Oh…
What’s being recommended is LibreTranslate, which isn’t the same. LibreTranslate is server software. On Android, you can use “Translate You”. I co-maintain Dialect, which is an app for Linux. We host a server at https://lt.dialectapp.org/ , so feel free to make use of it.
This is a single unofficial client for the mentioned software. LibreTranslate itself is fantastic.
Aurora isn’t really anti-google as it’s merely a different front end for Play (that you can use anonymously).
Need more calendar options such as mailbox.org.
Good start though!
Yeah, plus all the android alternatives are just different android distributions.
It’s important to recognize that Android distributions without Google’s (spyware) Play Services are vastly better for privacy than the commercial Android distributions that ship on most phones. To overlook/minimize that difference by calling them “just” different Android distributions is misleading.
I mean yeah I know they’re better, I run lineage os, but it still is just another android distribution, not a real android alternative. I feel like the people who just want safer android are going to be confused by them being called “alternatives” and the people who want an alternative know that they aren’t really alternatives.
The need being served here is for an alternative to Google’s spyware, not for an alternative to Android.
The Android operating system itself is not a significant privacy problem. (It might seem like one because most Android distributions include Google Play Services, but without that, Android is pretty tame and very useful.)
Mailbox is pretty good. The UI is a bit clunky, but so far I like it.
Agree on the calendar. In particular would like to find one with map integration.
Aurora isn’t really anti-google as it’s merely a different front end for Play (that you can use anonymously).
You could say the same about Piped, which is just an alt front end for YouTube.
None of these alternatives seem to tackle the networking effect of the root Google services. None of them address durability, either. Proton VPN launched in 2017, Google’s been around since 1998. Microsoft’s been around since 1975. IBM’s been around since 1911.
If you don’t mind rebasing your entire digital profile every five or ten years, these alternatives are fine. But most people don’t want to ditch a 20 year old email address or fiddle with a brand new OS, when enshitification can be right around the corner for any of these services in another few years.
Ffs, I’d just finished putting the shine on my PLEX server before they shit the bed.
Appreciate the post. Good perspective on this.
I use Tuta for email but damn if the Tuta calendar app isn’t god awful. I don’t know if they improved it (this was like 6 months ago) but I couldn’t duplicate events and I would both get phantom notifications for old deleted events and I wouldn’t get notifications for updated events.
I’m somewhat glad I’m not the only one getting phantom notifications. I got one last week for a deleted event. It took me a minute to figure out what was going on.
I’ve been debating leaving Tuta and switching to mailbox.org. I’m annoyed by the lack of support for standard protocols like S/MIME and SMTP. As far as I understand with encryption, I can only send encrypted emails to other Tuta users in practice. Yes, I can send emails encrypted with a password. But it kind of defeats the point if the password has to be sent unprotected where an attacker could just use the password to unencrypt the email themselves. The lack of SMTP support also means none of my self-hosted services can send emails.
The good: I have never seen ghost notifications or wrong notifications. The bad: it’s still ugly but I don’t mind.
