There's been a good amount of talk in certain quarters about moving away from the software services of the Silicon Valley oligarchs, for a variety of reasons...
Have any of you moved your email and photo hosting? Browser? Search? Social media? How has the experience been?
I'm mostly using Firefox and Duck Duck Go, but I don't know if it makes enough of a difference. My wife's on Bluesky and is done with Twitter.
I wouldn't mind switching away from google, and I need a new phone so some sort of decision has to be made soon.
Recently I saw LibreWolf (https://librewolf.net/) touted as a reasonable browser, but again I haven't quite made the jump.
I've been using Vivaldi recently and it's good and has a nicely integrated local email client in it..
On google and phone I read a research paper a while back that showed google download 10time the amount of personal data off a phone as compared to apple, so if that's the choice you might be making, then perhaps Iphone* is the way to go.
* not that I have one, I went back to feature phones a while back and haven't missed the 'smart' element in my life. :)
Quote from: Jacob on February 03, 2026, 04:25:11 PMThere's been a good amount of talk in certain quarters about moving away from the software services of the Silicon Valley oligarchs, for a variety of reasons...
Have any of you moved your email and photo hosting? Browser? Search? Social media? How has the experience been?
I'm mostly using Firefox and Duck Duck Go, but I don't know if it makes enough of a difference. My wife's on Bluesky and is done with Twitter.
I wouldn't mind switching away from google, and I need a new phone so some sort of decision has to be made soon.
Recently I saw LibreWolf (https://librewolf.net/) touted as a reasonable browser, but again I haven't quite made the jump.
Firefox is good. LibreWolf is a stripped down version of Firefox. to each their own.
The bitching about Firefox is for 3 reasons:
1) Telemetry that you can disable in the settings
2) Google (or Bing?) as the default search engine that you can easily switch to anything, or add anything else you want that is not listed
3) AI that can be disabled and will be easier to disable in the next update toward the end of the month.
Search:
Startage, DuckDuckGo and Google as fallback option. I don't think I can work without Google. I do not remember the details, but there's an antitrust suit against them in the US about blocking access to competitors as the default search engine, which prevents said competitors from getting revenus that would help them get better. So, essentially, that's the problem. They collected all our data, got so good that they're hard to live without for 100% of our search things.
And Gemini is fracking insane as it can even look through Gmail. Duh... So much for privacy.
Social Media. Here is where it hurts. If you want privacy, it needs to be decentralized or small. Languish is small, it's private. No one is collecting and selling our data, someone is paying out of his own pocket to host us. If it's big, it has to be decentralized to share the hosting costs. And most protocols don't talk well to one another.
BlueSky is a good Twitter alternative. Mastodon is a bad Reddit alternative. Connect to a Canadian server to see some content, but then connect to an Iranian server and you won't see the Canadian servers and boards.
But it's quite private, relatively anonymous in the sens that no one is gathering your data to sell it to big corp so that AI chatbots can have their own private discussion forums.
Here is a guide from Europe about de-Americanization:
https://eurotechguide.com/
Somewhere I have something else on another computer.
Off the top of my head:
MS Office.
For home: LibreOffice.
Business: La Suite Numérique (https://github.com/suitenumerique). It has something to replace Teams and Zoom, will be part of France business tools by 2027.
Password management:
Bitwarden. Free to use for home, premium version at 20$US /month.
VPN: Proton VPN.
AI: Lumo by Proton is private, slow and half braindead. But it's almost working. If you need the stuff, there are LLMs you can compile on your computer.
E-mail:
I use Thunderbird as my e-mail client, then set whatever e-mail provider I want through there. I use my ISP + Proton mail (free) + my own domain + Hotmail + Gmail. Hotmail and Gmail are needed for Windows and authentification.
Anthentification:
I'm still using Google, thinking of switching to Proton's auth.
Browsers:
Firefox is my main browser on all computers. With a Firefox account you can share addons and bookmarkes through all computers. I like that feature. All major browsers offer this now. Optional feature, you use it or don't, it works equally well.
Ublock Origin is a must have extension. If a site breaks, disable it for the site.
History cleaner, it clears everything the browser hasn't on exit.
Vivaldi as an alternate. Based on Chromium. I rarely use it, but sometimes if a site requires Chrome, I take it.
Edge. It's there, can't remove it. I prefer Vivaldi, but that thing is there, nagging me to be the default browser after each major Windows update. I don't know the consequences of a forced removal, so I'm leaving it there. I've kept MSN.Ca as my opening page, so I keep updated on the very important news about our Royal family. ;)
This is a site about OpenSource alternatives. I don't specifically seek Open Source alternatives, imho, if it works, it works. When it stops working, I find something else.
https://www.opensourcealternative.to/
Quote from: mongers on February 04, 2026, 07:44:09 AMOn google and phone I read a research paper a while back that showed google download 10time the amount of personal data off a phone as compared to apple, so if that's the choice you might be making, then perhaps Iphone* is the way to go.
On Samsung, I believe we are mostly locked in with Android.
The AI is apparently useful. Will get to test soon. It's one of the reason why it exchanges so much data, when you use the AI.
On other phones, you can de-Google it. More private, less features.
Don't all these just use Amazon servers anyway? Not to dampen the mood.
Quote from: HVC on February 04, 2026, 12:45:06 PMDon't all these just use Amazon servers anyway? Not to dampen the mood.
I don't think they use AWS outside of hosting the installation software for some.
Proton is expanding its server capacities trhough Europe and elsewhere.
Bluesky and Mastodon, no idea where they reside all.
Quote from: viper37 on February 04, 2026, 12:23:47 PMHere is a guide from Europe about de-Americanization:
https://eurotechguide.com/
Somewhere I have something else on another computer.
Off the top of my head:
MS Office.
For home: LibreOffice.
Business: La Suite Numérique (https://github.com/suitenumerique). It has something to replace Teams and Zoom, will be part of France business tools by 2027.
Password management:
Bitwarden. Free to use for home, premium version at 20$US /month.
VPN: Proton VPN.
AI: Lumo by Proton is private, slow and half braindead. But it's almost working. If you need the stuff, there are LLMs you can compile on your computer.
E-mail:
I use Thunderbird as my e-mail client, then set whatever e-mail provider I want through there. I use my ISP + Proton mail (free) + my own domain + Hotmail + Gmail. Hotmail and Gmail are needed for Windows and authentification.
Anthentification:
I'm still using Google, thinking of switching to Proton's auth.
Browsers:
Firefox is my main browser on all computers. With a Firefox account you can share addons and bookmarkes through all computers. I like that feature. All major browsers offer this now. Optional feature, you use it or don't, it works equally well.
Ublock Origin is a must have extension. If a site breaks, disable it for the site.
History cleaner, it clears everything the browser hasn't on exit.
Vivaldi as an alternate. Based on Chromium. I rarely use it, but sometimes if a site requires Chrome, I take it.
Edge. It's there, can't remove it. I prefer Vivaldi, but that thing is there, nagging me to be the default browser after each major Windows update. I don't know the consequences of a forced removal, so I'm leaving it there. I've kept MSN.Ca as my opening page, so I keep updated on the very important news about our Royal family. ;)
This is a site about OpenSource alternatives. I don't specifically seek Open Source alternatives, imho, if it works, it works. When it stops working, I find something else.
https://www.opensourcealternative.to/
This is a good list.
I use Mullvad VPN which I believe is based on Sweden.
For cloud storage, I self-host a Nextcloud server. It's really not too tricky to get one up and running with a Raspberry Pi or mini-PC and two external HDDs set up in a RAID. :)
For password manager, I use KeePass. It's free and I simply host the password file on my Nextcloud cloud storage so it's synced between all my devices. If the server is down, then there's still the local copies available until I get the server back up and running.
I've considered switching from Gmail to ProtonMail, and ProtonMail apparently makes it pretty simple, but I'm stubborn and resistant to change.
And I recommend switching your OS to Linux. I use and prefer Debian. It's rock-solid and doesn't require tinkering unless you're using very new hardware or cutting edge software.
Quote from: HisMajestyBOB on February 04, 2026, 10:20:39 PMQuote from: viper37 on February 04, 2026, 12:23:47 PMHere is a guide from Europe about de-Americanization:
https://eurotechguide.com/
snip
...
This is a good list.
I use Mullvad VPN which I believe is based on Sweden.
For cloud storage, I self-host a Nextcloud server. It's really not too tricky to get one up and running with a Raspberry Pi or mini-PC and two external HDDs set up in a RAID. :)
For password manager, I use KeePass. It's free and I simply host the password file on my Nextcloud cloud storage so it's synced between all my devices. If the server is down, then there's still the local copies available until I get the server back up and running.
I've considered switching from Gmail to ProtonMail, and ProtonMail apparently makes it pretty simple, but I'm stubborn and resistant to change.
And I recommend switching your OS to Linux. I use and prefer Debian. It's rock-solid and doesn't require tinkering unless you're using very new hardware or cutting edge software.
Thanks HmBob, some good suggestions there.