Ask HN: How to move away from Google

• omapsapp

  268 8,536 9.9 C++

  🍃 Organic Maps is a free Android & iOS offline maps app for travelers, tourists, hikers, and cyclists. It uses crowd-sourced OpenStreetMap data and is developed with love by MapsWithMe (MapsMe) founders and our community. No ads, no tracking, no data collection, no crapware. Please donate to support the development!

  

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

Though it's not as focused on driving, it seems.

• DecSync

  28 584 0.0

  Synchronize RSS, contacts, calendars, tasks and more without a server

I wrote a bit about it at a blog post [0]. My idea is to substitute the "cloud"(i.e, you data and applications running someone else's computers) for a "lake" of your own devices where you can replicate and synchonize the data, and use native, free applications for each of the devices that you have.

So, for hardware

- Workstations: Linux

- Mobile: /e/OS [1]

For software:

- GDrive -> Syncthing for the documents, LibreOffice on workstations, simple document viewers on mobile

- Email: My own domain, service provided by namecheap, costs ~20€/year.

- Contacts, Calendar -> Syncthing to synchonize the files between the devices, and https://github.com/39aldo39/DecSync as a calendar provider on thunderbird (workstation) and k-mail (mobile)

- App Store: F-Droid for most software, and the odd exception (Berlin ticket's) that is not F/OSS I use the /e/OS store (which proxies some of the apps from Google into their own store)

- Maps: MagicEarth (works well, uses OSM data, can do navigation decently and allows to choose download maps to keep offline). One of these days I will try again to self-host a tiling server, but I'm not sure what I would do for navigation.

- Messaging: Matrix/Element is my main client, I also have XMPP. Both are hosted by communick, the "professional managed service" that I run [2]. I also have Telegram (FOSS client) on mobile, but I've been meaning to implement the bridge on communick so that I can ditch the client. I use hangouts only on the computer if and only if the other party is not available on the preferred methods.

- Search: Brave search is working well. I preferred Brave over DDG because Brave is building their own index. If you think your queries are not giving you good results, you can turn on "Google mixing", where they make a (proxied) query to Google and show their results mixed with their own.

[0]: https://raphael.lullis.net/thinking-heads-are-not-in-the-clo...

[1]: https://e.foundation

[2]: https://communick.com

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

• searx-instances

  221 92 9.0 Python

  SearXNG instances list

  

I'll suggest Searx/SearXNG as a search engine. It's self-hosted, but you can find public instances at https://searx.space/

If you decide to go the self-hosted route, it's trivial to deploy with searx(ng)-docker. Being a meta-search engine, it can pull results Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, dictionaries, torrent sites, etc; this gives it a degree of customisability that traditional search engines don't have.

I'll also mention Whoogle, which serves as a libre front-end to Google, although it doesn't currently support any other search engines.

• Cryptomator

  491 10,619 9.7 Java

  Multi-platform transparent client-side encryption of your files in the cloud

  

I see a lot of recommendations for self hosted alternatives, either at home or a VPS/Rented server. While the HN crowd is probably better suited than most people, running a server connected to the internet is no small taks, and people should seriously consider other alternatives before doing so.

For some of the services, your own privacy measures may not matter one bit. Take email for example, you may self host it, or use a privacy oriented provider, but it doesn't help one bit if you recipient is on gmail or outlook, so one could argue that attempting to privacy secure email is in vain. You can of course use GPG, but that requires the receiver to publish keys, which not very many people do.

I've self hosted for a couple of decades, but some years ago i decided i no longer wanted to be our resident sysadm, and instead moved everything to the cloud. I went from a proxmox cluster and a couple of NAS boxes spinning at home, to nothing spinning, and no open ports in the firewall.

We now use regular cloud services (Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud, etc), and instead use Cryptomator (https://cryptomator.org/) to encrypt everything before sending it to the cloud.

For specific apps we use

- Joplin for notes (or just ios notes)

- Signal for messaging (though in reality we use quite a few clients, as it highly depends on what your recipient uses)

- MXRoute for mail / contacts

- DuckDuckGo for searching.

- Cryptomator on top of whatever cloud storage the individual prefers.

- Photos, here we chose the easy path, and simply use the integration offered by our phones, which in our case means iPhones, so iCloud.

• providers

  11 228 6.4

  Discontinued community-maintained list of Nextcloud providers

  

I moved from Gmail to Posteo, Gdrive to Nextcloud, and Android to /e/ OS. I self-host Nextcloud and installed the mobile OS myself, but if someone is not inclined, both have ready to use offerings as well.

Nextcloud partnered with providers and they give 2GB instances for free, allegedly. If you need more, you can check https://github.com/nextcloud/providers#providers

Buy an /e/ OS phone: https://esolutions.shop/

There are also third party sellers, like "Liberate your tech", who sell phones with GrapheneOS preinstalled.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

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