
How to Live Without Google - janober
https://spreadprivacy.com/how-to-remove-google/
======
franga2000
I really don't see switching to iOS an improvement. Not only is it insanely
expensive, it's not even necessary. Android can be used without Google very
easily. You can even get one of the hundreds of chinese phones that don't have
any Google software whatsoever. Try using an iPhone without an Apple account.

~~~
j_s
What do you recommend instead?

~~~
jhasse
LineageOS [https://www.lineageos.org/](https://www.lineageos.org/) \+ F-Droid
[https://f-droid.org/](https://f-droid.org/)

~~~
gsnedders
LineageOS's security story is _appalling_ though.

[https://cve.lineageos.org/kernels](https://cve.lineageos.org/kernels) is
their tracker for CVEs in non-deprecated kernels they ship in officially
supported devices: no kernel they ship has 100% of CVEs patched, and both mean
and median are about 49% of CVEs patched. And this is before we start even
considering the firmware blobs that are shipped that haven't had security
updates in years.

~~~
Rotareti
Plus, you have to execute non-reproducible binaries in order to install
LinageOS on your phone.

------
mhd
I tried most of that a few months ago. The problems, as many others pointed
out, is that instead of being eaten by one monster, you're being nibbled at by
a few.

Stuff that worked:

\- gmail/calendar -> fastmail. I still miss a few features of the gmail web
interface, but in general I'm very happy with the switch.

\- reader -> feedbin. Yeah, as if I had a proper choice.

Partial success:

\- search -> DuckDuckGo: I find myself hitting !g often enough for more
"fuzzy" searches, or ones where I'm looking for German content. Which happens
often enough, as I've had wikipedia/imdb shortcuts for ages and so don't need
to google that only to click on the first link popping up.

\- maps -> Bing/OpenStreetMap: I'm mostly a desktop user when it comes to
maps, and find myself using the !bm tag in DDG more and more. Directions are
good and it zooms faster on my Linux desktop. Mobile situation ain't that
great.

Failed:

\- mobile -> LineageOs: I got my old Nexus 4 and put LineageOs on it. But it's
hard to get by just with F-Droid apps alone. As a compromise, I'm using a
cheap iPhone 5c for most stuff these days. I'm seriously considering ditching
smartphones altogether and lugging my Sony reader, Sansa Fuze and an old Nokia
flip phone around again...

~~~
tome
> \- gmail/calendar -> fastmail. I still miss a few features of the gmail web
> interface, but in general I'm very happy with the switch.

I've heard good things about fastmail, but is there a provider that hosts
_open source_ calendar software? I think I'd slightly prefer that.

~~~
qznc
I use mailbox.org, they use a customized Open-Xchange. Not sure if it is the
open source community edition, though.

~~~
omnimus
I use mailbox too. It is privacy minded email/caldav host with great price and
nice ui.

I am not sure if they use any proprietary software though.

------
ekianjo
> Android -> iOS

this one surprised me to say the least. It's like jumping from the dragon's
mouth into the lion's pit. Both are not good options for privacy, you have no
knowledge of what Apple collects and what it does with your data either and it
basically requires you to have an iTunes account. At least on Android you can
install other app stores like Freedroid which are not linked to any major
vendor.

~~~
fortythirteen
There is no single good phone option for privacy minded people in the U.S. at
the moment, but Apple has definitely shown themselves to be the lesser of two
privacy evils.

At least Apple stood up to the FBI when they wanted an encryption backdoor.

~~~
r3bl
> At least Apple stood up to the FBI when they wanted an encryption backdoor.

They also gave the FBI the last iCloud backup of the phone (a month before the
attack happened), so it's not like they haven't cooperated with the FBI at all
in that case. It's just that it wasn't enough to the FBI, and that's where
Apple drew the line.

~~~
ctdonath
If they have the data, and can supply the data in readable form, they may be
legally obligated to provide it. Not much else you can do at that moment, if
you're Tim Cook trying to stay out of prison.

Apple _is_ clearly working toward securing that data so they _can 't_ supply
it in readable form. Hard to reconcile that with excellent usability & UX, but
they're solidly heading that way. Encrypting that iCloud backup such that it
[mathematically] cannot be used without the Secure Enclave is surely coming.
To wit: "here's all the data we have, only the defendant can unlock it, and no
we're not building backdoors in."

------
hzhou321
To live without google is not hard. But the question is not about can or
cannot, it is about will or will not. It is about will you deliberately choose
less ideal products simply out of an idea. It is about how much, really, do
you buy into that idea. Essentially, it is a crusade, honorable but hardly
workable.

Don't just to avoid google for the pure idea's sake, try truly see and
understand the factors that google controls or limits or annoys you. If you
don't have any, then don't bother. But if you notice it, you'll desire the
otherwise freedom. When you desire the freedom, you'll find the small
inconvenience worthwhile.

------
blubb-fish
I totally second the basic idea here. I also try to avoid abusive monopolists
where I can. I never order at Amazon, I deleted my FB account, I switched from
GMail to FastMail and try to use DDG instead of Google.

Having said that - the problem with Google is that it provides really useful
services and it is really difficult to actually argue that Google is bad. They
are doing lots of good stuff. They "abused" their monopoly to push SSL/HTTPS,
they recklessly improve web advertisement and so on.

Still FB is measurably bad for people's wellbeing, Amazon is treating their
workers badly and their customer service gets shittier with every year. Google
is just too big. And too much power in one hand is never beneficial in the
long run.

Just saying.

PS: deepl.com is actually better than Google Translate for several languages -
so you can start with that and even benefit :)

~~~
RationalMoose
> the problem with Google is that it provides really useful services and it is
> really difficult to actually argue that Google is bad. They are doing lots
> of good stuff

That's how i feel about Amazon.

~~~
XR0CSWV3h3kZWg
Yeah, I have so far settled for trying competitors from time to time and
trying to keep up to date with amazon and google's overreaches so I can switch
when they do overstep.

------
jqs79
Unfortunately, Firefox for example does precious little to impede Google.
Everything from search to "safebrowsing" to geolocating to their own forums
runs through Google servers. The quote that "Google trackers have been found
on 75% of the top million websites" must be a huge underestimate, at least for
the top few thousands of websites; it would be surprising if more than 10 of
the top 1000 websites did not call some Google server on page load, and most
will use 5 or 10 Google services. Here in Canada, it's a very rare government
website that does not use Google services (American government sites are
actually a little better in this regard). My public library's website
(bibliocommons) sends every book I look up to Google.

Efforts like deleting browser cookies, while certainly a good policy, are
probably futile in light of all the ways that Google can track and identify
browsers; ip address, stored data, fingerprinting (see: panopticlick), canvas
fingerprinting, identification through network card timing, etc.

During the past few years, Google has been making a concerted attempt to make
website functionality dependent on interaction with Google services:
ampproject, googletagservices and googleapis (e.g. jquery) all freqently break
websites when browsers block these Google services.

For years now Google has been getting a free pass from governments, the media,
and most egregiously, developers, who should know better (nobody else knows
what 'HTTP' and 'packet' mean!). This is not to say that Google is evil;
they're just a unbelievably huge and powerful corporation that is not
accountable to anyone, and knows more about most people in the world than they
know about themselves, by most measures, and is rapidly developing technology
that will be able to make automated, qualitative judgments of people based on
this knowledge.

------
wheresvic1
I've been using DDG for about 2 years now and have rarely needed to resort to
a google search in this time. A few of the cases for google were funnily were
when I was trying to lookup someone and get their email address.

I do full-stack programming: java, Node.js react, angular, redux for my day
job and dabble in a bit of C++ outside of work as well.

~~~
DavideNL
... and in cases where DDG fails, you can fall back to
[https://www.startpage.com/](https://www.startpage.com/) which shows Googles
results but strips Googles tracking.

~~~
vollmond
Interesting.

Looks like DDG has a bang for it, too:
[https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=startpage](https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=startpage)

~~~
r3bl
DDG has a bang for a lot of things, because it's trivial to implement them
(they just redirect you to <page.com>/<something>?q=<your_search_term_here),
and trivial to make a suggestion.

------
chrishynes
The one thing keeping me on Google is Google Voice. I have yet to find another
solution that allows calling and SMS in/out on desktop and mobile all from the
same number.

What I need is simple, a single VOIP number linked to:

\- Calling/SMS on the desktop (Windows/Linux) and on the phone

\- Shared contacts and call/sms history on all devices

\- When I call out/text on any device, show the VOIP number in caller ID not
the device number

\- When I receive a call, ring all devices

I don't need any fancy handoff from device to device, or IM integration, or
anything else. Just ring all my damn devices and let me pick up one. Ideally
it would have an API that allows IM clients to integrate with it as a
protocol, but hell, at this point I'd go for a black box app if it could do
what I want.

Is there an app for that? I'm not sure its even possible on iPhone unless
you're iMessage, but of course that doesn't work if your desktop is non-Apple.

Seems like it would be fairly simple. Tempted to build something out myself,
but that's a lot of ongoing support.

Twilio -- that'd make a great showcase app and it's something I'd personally
pay for. Any chance you guys might pick that up?

~~~
dhd415
I'd happily pay for an alternative to GV, too, especially since Google has
shown little interest in GV and has a tendency to shut down services in which
they've lost interest (RIP, Google Reader). Better support for MMS would be
nice, too.

~~~
remir
There's Line2: [https://www.line2.com/page/google-voice-
alternative](https://www.line2.com/page/google-voice-alternative)

~~~
chrishynes
That looks very promising! Any experiences with it?

~~~
remir
I don't, unfortunately.

------
swalladge
Disappointed this list doesn't include Matrix/Riot as an alternative to
Hangouts/Allo. Also there are many Google Drive alternatives including
Syncthing (p2p), Dropbox, Nextcloud/Owncloud (selfhosted), Sugarsync,
SpiderOak, etc.

~~~
ekianjo
Disappointed it does not mention people should NOT be using Chromebooks
either. It's become quite prevalent these days.

~~~
tyingq
If you're buying a Chromebook because of the low price point, there is a way
out.

Many (not all) of them can be reflashed with a ROM that allows for a
mainstream Linux distro to be installed. [https://johnlewis.ie/custom-
chromebook-firmware/rom-download...](https://johnlewis.ie/custom-chromebook-
firmware/rom-download/)

~~~
bgrohman
What about the chroot/Crouton route?

~~~
tyingq
Crouton leaves ChromeOS in place and running, so I assumed it was out of place
for this discussion. I don't know how much the chroot does to mitigate that. I
assume, for example, it's still Google's kernel in place?

~~~
bgrohman
Yes, it's still using the same kernel.

------
pvinis
Most of these are fine replacements, but some are not, and that's the reason
I, and I imagine many more people, stay with google. google maps is great.
apple maps is much worse with searching, and shops etc, especially outside the
US. openstreetmap is very cool and I use it every now and then, and I wish it
becomes the standard online map, but it needs more care or something, I don't
know.

~~~
deep_attention
For car navigation I use HERE WeGo (traffic info), never looked back. On
foot/bike openstreetmap is the best.

~~~
usuallymatt
Which android app do you use for OpenStreet map?

------
romanovcode
In my experience once you leave Android living without google is a lot easier
then it sounds.

~~~
phoe-krk
And go for which OS on mobile? On iOS, you fall into Apple's hands, Windows
Mobile is dead, and other OSes are relatively non-existent.

~~~
bjpbakker
Purism's Librem 5 [1] looks like a very nice mobile phone alternative. It's
highly privacy minded, at least.

[1] - [https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/](https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/)

~~~
r3bl
...and they're still crowdfunding it and don't expect the deliveries before
2019.

Presumably, the question "go for which OS on mobile" refers to _now_ , so
Librem's definitely not an answer to the question above, even though it's a
marvelous goal.

------
alexsleepy
I'm trying to minimize my interaction with google, but I still use google maps
and google translate. Unfortunately Open Street Maps is nearly impossible to
use. And I didn't find any alternatives to translate at all

~~~
dingaling
What problems do you find with OSM?

I am a map-data contributor and am somewhat blinkered as a result. What's
missing or clunky from the perspective of general users?

~~~
alexsleepy
The main problem I faced with OSM is search. When I enter the name of the
street it takes me to the random city which has the street with the same name.
Google limits search results to the city I'm currently in

~~~
jqs79
Oops, yes, same problem.

------
phatbyte
I live fine without FB, Twitter etc..

But I can't find any good replacement for Google services unfortunately.

Tried Duck Duck Go for a full month, but the returned results weren't as
accurate as Google, I missed some of functionalities the search automatically
gives to you. I could switch to bing, although I don't know if that would make
a huge difference, privacy wise.

~~~
driverdan
When was the last time you used DDG? It used to be worse but it's roughly on
par now.

~~~
lh7777
Not the OP, but I try it every year or so and always give up after a few
weeks. I've been using DDG again for about a week or so, and the results are
still about as bad as I remember. It's fine for really common searches such as
finding a company's website that I don't remember the domain name for or
getting quick info about popular places or things, but anything even slightly
obscure (like "how do I do x with y?") is almost always useless. I very
quickly get into the habit of adding "!g" to the majority of my searches.

That said, I'm going to try to keep using DDG this time. Although most of my
"important" searches are still going to Google, at least they're not seeing
absolutely everything I search for.

------
_tulpa
There are a crapload of alternatives, switching in a meaningful way is hard:

1) You have to give up convenience (and/or money), nowadays the alternatives
have caught up to where this is kinda the only point of difference but you
still have to give up something more tangible than your digital privacy and
some data you didn't even know existed.

2) You have to convince other people to use whatever messaging app you've
switched to. My social bubble pretty much only uses Facebook for that, nobody
is changing any time soon and I'm the only one even thinking about it.

I'm like a week into my goal of a month without google and ideally owning as
much . I have firefox, a non-gmail email account, Syncthing in place of google
drive (luckily I don't need the documents part of it), and LineageOS with
FDroid and no google play services (and 3-4x the battery life). What I don't
have is p2p calendar/contacts sync, which is pretty annoying.

~~~
qbaqbaqba
I really really miss times when google talk, facebook messenger and a bunch of
other lesser known chat apps used xmpp! For p2p syncing you may want to have a
look at [https://syncthing.net/](https://syncthing.net/) \- however, you must
use apps that allow plain text export - and they are surprisingly hard to
find!

~~~
_tulpa
I do use syncthing, but like you say there are hardly any apps which can use
it.

There's OwnCloud (or *DAV servers) but I think it's a bit silly requiring a
server to host data which I'm only going to sync over 5 devices tops.

------
avinassh
I have a question, is it really possible to get out of Gmail? I may switch to
Fastmail or other alternatives, but all the people I know only use Gmail, so
my all my emails will still be present on Google's Servers. Or am I missing
something?

~~~
ocdtrekkie
This is more or less the case, an article about someone who bothered to count
is here, though it's a few years dated now (2014):
[https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-
be...](https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-
has-all-of-yours)

Also, bear in mind while reading the rest of this comment, that Google
_claims_ it no longer scans Gmail account content for ad targeting purposes:
[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-gmail/google-
to-...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-gmail/google-to-stop-
scanning-gmail-for-creating-targeted-ads-idUSKBN19E2C7)

The big question is, if you don't have a Google account attached to that mail,
can Google still profile you with it? Does Google relate all of the emails
people across their products get from you? If you aren't logged into a Google
account when browsing, does it help them target you with ads? Can the
government get a portion of your email by requesting Google give them a copy
of all emails from your non-Gmail account to Google servers? These are
probably the key questions on how much of an issue this is.

I also think there's probably a significant benefit from Google not having
access to information in your email that wouldn't come from Gmail users. For
example, if you don't have Gmail, Google can't know what you bought on Amazon
or who you're friends with on Facebook.

------
WindowsFon4life
I got rid of both my Iphone and Android. Moved over to a couple of inexpensive
Windows 10 mobile phones, and have not looked back. Lack of apps? Edge, for
all other cases, write your own. It's not hard to port apps, or to write your
own for remote apis. Never thought I would ever support Windows. Given how
many times I've wanted BG taken out for how bad it was. But I must admit, the
Windows lifestyle is pretty nice. Share all my devices on one account, and it
may not be up to par with Apple Lifestyle, but it's pretty good.

------
d_theorist
I like DDG, but I find in general that there are two main problems:

1\. It's still much slower than google. 2\. The results are still sometimes
lacking.

I could probably live with the slowness if the results were more consistently
high quality. For example, just the other day I was searching for some
specific error message in DDG and it returned 1 (irrelevant) result. Google
returned hundreds of good results. In that case it seemed to me that google
had indexed a lot of IRC archives and mailing list archives that DDG had not.

~~~
vollmond
I think DDG must be improving. I used to multiple times a day finish a DDG
search by adding "!g" to my terms to see if Google was better. Now it's maybe
once a week, maybe even less.

~~~
dhimes
I agree. For pretty much anything I do I'm using it without another thought.
Even the error messages are coming back well (but I am probably searching
simple error messages and not edge-case stuff). Also, hobby (sailing) and
around-the-house stuff is coming up great.

I still don't understand their business model though.

------
uisjum
I have switched most of my phn usage to laptop. Populate the host file with
any number of decent blacklists available on github. Install noscript in
Firefox and use it in private mode. With zeal docs and kiwix a lot of time I
spent online has also reduced. And oh yes all news sites have been blocked as
they are total waste of my time. I check the reddit most read articles about
once or twice a week and that's about it. It's not hard to keep things private
if you want too.

------
goosh453
these are mostly bad advices. google to vimeo, google to apple. move from one
unfree proprietary service to another..

archive.org for video-upload instead of youtube/vimeo is an option. searx
instead of google search. for smartphone you have to dig deeper ;)

------
insickness
If you're looking for another reason to live without Google, look into their
demonetization of youtube videos on political lines. This includes the
thoughtful Dave Rubin who recently had most of his videos demonetized.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=19&v=q4D0TBPd3JU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=19&v=q4D0TBPd3JU)

------
bambax
This is just a big product placement from DuckDuckGo, which should be hosted
on their website instead of "spreadprivacy".

------
harel
Sounds like this is just to spite Google. Moving from one beast (google) to
another (apple) seems unreasonable.

------
bgrohman
Interesting that the article offers no alternatives to Google Photos. I know
there are options, but they all seem to be far behind in terms of features.
Plus, migrating all of my photos out of Google Photos would be pain.

~~~
fwn
> migrating all of my photos out of Google Photos would be pain

You can export them (incl. meta data) through the regular Google Takeout. From
there you just have to upload them again to your new, preferred cloud
provider.

~~~
bgrohman
I've tried Google Takeout, but I have several hundred gigs of photos, so
uploading them elsewhere will be a pain. Plus, wherever I do upload them will
be lacking many of the features from Google Photos.

------
weberc2
I moved away from Chrome and Firefox since both Google and Mozilla have
unapologetically fired employees for thought crimes. Apple's posturing hardly
seems better. (I imagine this will resonate more with some than others, so
please note that I'm only adding this to explain why Firefox and safari
weren't options for me). I tried Brave, but it was too buggy. Finally, I
switched to Opera which seems to rival Chrome in most regards while feeling
more polished and blocking ads by default.

~~~
staticelf
I use Vivaldi, it is awesome.

~~~
weberc2
I've not heard of that; I'll check it out. Are you being downvoted as well? I
assume people _really_ hate Opera. ;)

~~~
tortasaur
If they're being downvoted, it's likely because Vivaldi is closed source.

------
dvfjsdhgfv
This list is mediocre. You want people to switch and recommend a paid service?
Good luck! For e-mail, outlook.com is a much better alternative. It has a
modern interface and spam filtering works reasonably well. Yes, you get
tracked by MS instead of another company, but at least you can use your e-mail
account without worrying about payments. (Yes, I've used FastMail and I think
it's great.)

------
teekert
Nextcloud should be on there, you can run it from your basement, it syncs
contacts, calendar and files (like drive), it even has a mail client which can
turn your cheap imap provider into nice webmail. Not to mention that it can
replace Google docs as well using
[https://www.collaboraoffice.com/nl/](https://www.collaboraoffice.com/nl/)

------
bukgoogle
This should be warning to all people. Specially when company dump people with
different political opinions out.

Delete accounts from people who do not fit they template ?

Ask yourself, is it "Evil" behaviour?

Facebook, Google, Twitter all same CIA orchestrated company model.

Please listen CIA whistleblowers, they will tell you what these companies are
doing with you and your information.

Listen Alex Jones, they have talked this now 10 years !

------
wu-ikkyu
For anyone who still wants to use google search, but doesn't want their
searches tied to their identity, check out GoogleSharing (originally developed
by Moxie)

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/googlesharing...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/googlesharing/)

------
dna_polymerase
Nope, Google Search is not the easiest. DuckDuckGo is not even close to Google
Search by any means. Last time I tried to switch I did not even last a week.
Maybe, instead of writing such articles you guys should hire some additional
engineers to make your search results better.

iOS is not an option for people preferring privacy. Cyanogen without Google
Packages is.

~~~
grimgrin
It's really pretty true. It's very hard for me to adapt to DDG style of
searching. A comment I said recently highlights one specific area:

    
    
      Those who use DDG, do you miss dates in results? Having a date present definitely helps me think about the results:
    
      https://www.google.com/search?q=dcss+branch+order
    
      https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dcss+branch+order
    
      This isn't a case where I _know_ I only want 2017 results, and so I do the syntax to filter it down automatically.
      I want all results, but I want to be aware of the timeline of whatever I'm going to click.

------
SippinLean
None of this addresses the main problem: all of Google's apps are so well
integrated that I'm locked in.

My Google Calendar appointments appear on my Google Maps the day they're
occurring. When I get a flight confirmation in GMail it's added to my Google
Calendar.

That doesn't work with Fastmail and Open Street Maps.

------
hobarrera
I've found here maps to be far superior to apple maps. Apple Maps are still
awful (I once wanted to go about 5 blocks from home, walking, and the app
decided that the destination was cross the atlantic. Lots of things alike).

DDG works great, and fastmail is fabulous. their UI/UX is years ahead of
Gmail's!

~~~
DaveWalk
I've had nothing but trouble with Here maps (now HERE WeGo), in the eastern
USA at least. Its UI/UX is sadly far behind GMaps. I would love an
alternative...

~~~
hobarrera
Yeah, each app varies a lot depending on where you live. HERE works fine in
Argentina, but Apple maps will constantly send you to other continents (even
if clicking on a contact's address that already has a preview of the map only
a few miles away).

I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing happened to others in other regions.

As for GMaps, I find their UX/UI awful and too complex. They really need to go
back to the old-school google that did simple things.

------
dvfjsdhgfv
I think quoting Resilio as an alternative to Google Drive is completely wrong.
You just handle your own important data to another company. Why should you do
that? For these purposes you should set up a self-hosted solution such as
ownCloud or one of its clones. Otherwise your data only changes hands.

~~~
lh7777
Resilio Sync is peer-to-peer, so if you believe their marketing copy, you're
not handing your data over to anyone -- it only syncs between your authorized
devices. Since Sync is proprietary software, it's a valid concern that Resilio
could be making copies of your data without your knowledge.

I use Resilio myself, but I'd rather use free software for this sort of thing.
Syncthing looks great aside from the lack of iOS support.

------
peterwwillis
For a Google Maps alternative on mobile, Maps.me works better than anything
I've found, including Google Maps. Its offline support is great, it takes up
very little space, and you can even load mapped out itineraries via KML
(though you might have to pay for that).

------
zeratax
I guess I can't recommended everyone my setup since it's pretty time
consuming, but I started hosting most google services I use myself.

I don't really see a huge difference in using Apple or Google in the end.

I used to just have a Nextcloud setup, which already lets you sync
files/contacts/calendar and with additional apps even rss feeds extremely
easily. [https://nextcloud.com/](https://nextcloud.com/)

But always sending my stuff across the entire Internet seemed rather
unnecessary when my server is in the same Network.

So now I've switched to Syncthing, which worjs pretty much lije Resilio Sync
But to be fair the experience of using syncthing is still far from comparable
to nextcloud or gdrive. As soon as you want to share single files you end up
having to write regex based ignore files and you can't just give someone a
link to something. [https://syncthing.net](https://syncthing.net)

Then for contacts/calendar I use radicale a tiny python script.
[http://radicale.org/](http://radicale.org/)

For rss feeds I've decided to use selfoss
[https://selfoss.aditu.de/](https://selfoss.aditu.de/)

A small raspberry pi seems so far good enough for that. For messenging I use
Matrix/Riot but hosting that on my rpi is probably too much. Riot allows to
use jitsi video conference widgets now aswell.
[https://riot.im](https://riot.im) [https://matrix.org](https://matrix.org)

I'd also check out yunohost that should allow you to host these things as one
click apps and has a complete ldap setup built in.
[https://yunohost.org/](https://yunohost.org/)

Also interesting is searx, which describes itself as a privacy-respecting,
hackable metasearch engine. You could easily host this yourself or use one of
the many instances.
[https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/](https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/)

I personally settled for android with lineageos without gapps. I think that
android open source apps have come along way and with fdroid they are just as
convenient to use (arguably even better than) gstore. And you could still
always install yalp, which allows you to download the apk from the gstore
without the need of an account, or even with your account to get previously
bought apps and update them. I still use YouTube, but I sync my channel
subscriptions over rss feeds and use newpipe on android to watch videos (it
even has a picture in picture or play audio in background mode) or on my pc
with mpv/youtube-dl (shift - t makes a video stay on top)

Getting to this pointed definitely took time and you need to be somewhat tech
savvy. In the end I still have to rely on nonfree apps like whatsapp since
matrix still has no real bridge and probably never will due to the walled in
nature of WhatsApp for better or worse.

Oh one last thing, if you really need to track your websites's users behavior
I would check out Piwik. I persobally don't have trouble with analytics and
definitely understand that there is often no way around it. But I think as
long as you are the only one I have to trust with that data I can accept that.
Everything else gets blocked with umatrix/ublock
[https://piwik.org/](https://piwik.org/)

~~~
marvinpinto
I think that must be a typo? [https://syncthing.net](https://syncthing.net)

~~~
zeratax
Yep thanks, I fixed it now.

------
WindowsFon4life
The key is ensuring that choice exists. It's easy to jump on the 'Must have
Apple!' or the latest Google Nexus. We create the very monster we complain
about when it gets TOO popular. This is very much inline with Southpark and
Walmart...

------
ekianjo
> Ghost (paid)

This is inaccurate as this is not the only option. You can still download the
source and run an instance on your own server.

[https://docs.ghost.org/docs/hosting](https://docs.ghost.org/docs/hosting)

~~~
bovermyer
I think the point was that you can have completely free WordPress (hosted on
wordpress.com), compared to Ghost, which costs money either for your own
hosting or for hosted Ghost.

~~~
pgeorgi
Running Ghost on your own system doesn't cost a cent, eg through
[https://hub.docker.com/_/ghost](https://hub.docker.com/_/ghost)

------
rukenshia
I have a G Suite account mainly to have email addresses across different
domains using the routing google provides. Is this possible with Fastmail too?
If not, is there any other service out there that would provide this?

------
josefresco
The article leads with "Google trackers" but there's no mention of how to
block Google's tracking services... I get it's somewhat outside the scope of
the article but seems relevant.

~~~
GCU-Empiricist
Do you have a good article to share for this, or is it generally infeasible?

~~~
ekianjo
First step would be to block Google Analytics using an ad blocker.

~~~
rypskar
I don't want to directly block ads, only tracking, so I use ghostery instead
of an ad-blocker. Most ads are also blocked, but it is because the sites chose
to use ad networks that also track me, not because I am trying to take away
their way of making money

~~~
ekianjo
You can block Google Analytics using NoScript. Which is not an adblocker.

------
epynonymous
in china, google services have been blocked by the gfw for some time now,
after a few months of requiring vpn just to access gmail and websites, i
decided to switch to other products, for example, outlook.com for email. in
china, life is fine without google, i use baidu maps, youku/iqiyi video,
outlook.com for email, i'm already using an iphone so the lack of a play store
is irrelevant. i imagine this would be worse for places where there aren't
local solutions where google is the best or only solution for things like
maps.

------
chrisper
I am in the process of replacing Google services that could badly affect me if
Google chooses to ban my account. Like Gmail and Google drive. Maps and such
still can be used without an account.

~~~
caseysoftware
Don't forget to update all those places you did a social auth "Sign in with
Google!" For me personally, that include Stack Overflow with 7+ years of
history.

That's one of the things that concerns me about losing my Google or Twitter
accounts.

~~~
hexis
You can have multiple social logins on SO (including any arbitrary OpenID
provider), so you can be very safe on that site.

------
xiaoma
There's a much cleaner solution. Just live in China and don't use a VPN.
Unless you stay in an expat bubble, you likely won't even _hear_ about Google
very often.

------
alexsleepy
BTW can Chromium count as an alternative to Chrome? I know it's still google,
but it's open source and lacks some google api integrations

~~~
zeratax
You maybe want to checkout ungoogled-chromium
[https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-
chromium](https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium)

------
okjdjd
Google are too political to be trusted. Sad they couldn't take the high road
that they pretend to take.

------
marvinpinto
I had never heard of Resilio Sync before today, looks pretty neat. Anyone have
experience with it?

~~~
c0wb0yc0d3r
I've used it, and it works. However I ran into an issue where I couldn't use
it at my parents' house so I ultimately switched to Syncthing. The biggest
differences are Syncthing isn't built directly on top of bittorrent, and
opensource.

------
graphememes
You want to know how to truly live without google?

Build and run your own systems. That is the only way.

------
staticelf
What about if you're a site owner and want analytics but not from Google?

~~~
phireal
Piwik seems to work OK for me.

~~~
bovermyer
I'll second Piwik. It's not difficult to set up and offers feature parity for
the most important things.

------
wolfi1
it would be sufficient for me, if there was a firebase replacement, but it
seems push messages are only possible via firebase

------
tjr
Any good alternative for Google Docs?

~~~
Endy
I use Zoho for that.

~~~
sluggg
Zoho is a pain to use

~~~
Endy
Can you explain that in more detail? I quite like it, and it takes less
resources than GDocs.

------
xxdesmus
new title - replace one brand with another brand. This article seems more like
a blog post of just personal preferences.

------
madshiva
but I don't want too.

I was using and supporting Google with Maps since the beginning I contribute
to Google Maps with Local Partners.

I contributed to Google Maps by creating 3D Building with Sketch up. I will
not spit on my own soup.

It's almost always a win-win, that I can't get with any other service
(Facebook, apple) on Internet, I still believe in a good way with Google, they
made so many thing freely for us, like Books research, Google Ngram Viewer,
Google Analytics, etc. Almost everything are free, ok there's some targeting,
etc that could be bad but the product produced by Google had real impact on
the day to day life. Like no one BIG company product did. (Facebook, twitter,
didn't change the world for me.)

Please Google, I want a job in your company. I can do anything.

PS: Why I'm downvoted? Apple fanboy argue a little please I know you don't
have brain. Too easy to go down, never go up

~~~
beauzero
I always tell my children "...there is nothing free on the internet."

~~~
madshiva
yeah Wikipedia is not free... Linux is not free. My comment are free.

I still can't compare Facebook to Google about targeting, ads, or other things
that people tell about Google. Facebook give you what? Google always fight for
giving product utility. Like Google Maps, they had the balls to change the
world. Google earth / Google moon someone? someone us it? yeah but spit on
your soup.

~~~
Shywim
Nothing is free in the world. Wikipedia is living of donations, same for most
of linux distros.

Google and Facebook are living thanks to the nice value of your data and also
thanks to your free contributions.

Yes, you contributed to Google Maps for free, you did get nothing for the time
you spent on it, nobody know that you did this work, you get no
acknowledgement except maybe an email for which the only goal is to make you
do more free work.

All visitors coming to Google Maps are thanking Google for the work you've
done. And after all this free hard work, you are still paying for the use of
their product with your data.

~~~
madshiva
All the users that have contributed freely, but it's not free.

I contributed and in the return I get free access to the product or advantage.
I don't pay. My data worth nothing.

People who think that by paying google to get the pub get a return of money is
them who is wrong. Google uses schema but all the people who pay for
advertising are those who pay for the service. Not me, not people who
participate for free. It is like a concert if people participate voluntarily
and the concert is free it is free, even if he knows your name, your
schedules. This is unnecessary data.

It's free = you are the product is with Facebook not Google.

~~~
ionised
Your data is priceless to Google, because it allows them to serve their true
customers, the advertisers.

You are the product with both Facebook and Google.

I find it bizarre that you can't see this.

------
diegoperini
> Google Chrome -> Safari (free), Firefox (free)

No.

~~~
Helloworldboy
Safari is so much better than chrome. Especially when using a MacBook if you
want more than 1.5hrs of battery life.

------
Jsmth
I can live without Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon. But I can't
live without Google. That is the reality.

