11 ms·
Transitioning Away from Google Services
- berdon 4y agoA few opinionated differences: - Mail -> Fastmail - Search -> Kagi - Photos -> Google Photos (sorry, but...it's fantastic) - Docs/Sheets/Slides -> Native/Non-Web Microsoft Office - Keep/Notes -> Logseq - Chrome -> Firefox or Orion - News -> Hackernews - Sites -> Ghost + Digital Ocean - Authenticator -> Authy
- AlphaCerium 4y agoWhat exactly do you mean by "Sites -> VS Code"? Do you mean create the webpage from scratch yourself, because a big part of Google Sites is that the site is also hosted for you, and I don't think asking a user of Google Sites to create a webpage and host it themselves is the best idea.
- berdon 4y agoI've updated my comment with what I use for hosting my site. But my intent was what you gleaned. Edit: Fastmail even offers website/hosting as a part of your email service. I'm just biased being a developer and cry at the thought of sites or wordpress - knowing all too well that those products bring real value to many, many people.
- tigerlily 4y ago> Fastmail even offers website/hosting as a part of your email service I had to check that this was true and lo' it is: https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000280141-How-to-set-up-a-website https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000280141-Ho...
- jboogie77 4y agoagree with authy. would switch if i wasnt lazy
- 4d66ba06 4y agoA reminder for everyone that Authy allows multi device and backups in case you lose your phone. From my understanding Google Authenticator doesn't offer either of these.
- PascLeRasc 4y agoPlease keep in mind that by using Authy you're implicitly supporting the use of SMS 2FA everywhere. We need to push companies to get off of SMS 2FA and giving Twilio another user to put on their quarterly report isn't going to help.
- eviks 4y agoSince the support is something you've made up, how would Twilio get the message that I'm not using Authy because I don't support SMS?
- nighthawk454 4y agoThere's also storing 2fa in 1password if you use that, even more convenient
- thefounder 4y agoGoogle apps/workspace -> zoho
- squalo 4y agoBitwarden also has authenticator functionality. I find it the most convenient to replace google auth as BW is also where all my passwords are stashed.
- binaryanomaly 4y agoAll easy except: - Youtube —> can’t get around it - Maps —> in few cases where apple maps is just not good enough (depends on where you live) Don’t miss anything else 1sec!
- jboogie77 4y agoyea theres no way to get around youtube. I think theres stuff like peertube but its not the same
- dschuessler 4y agoThere's no way to get around YouTube-the-service, but at least you can get around YouTube-the-client: https://piped.video/ https://piped.video/
- Bloating 4y agoIts not that Apple maps isn't good enough, its that the world has not caught up with Apple's vision
- binaryanomaly 4y agoHaha, yes I‘ll tell the hospital that they are in fact at the wrong location and should consider moving to the address displayed in apple maps ;)
- brutusurp 4y agoYoutube -> D.tube
- WorldMaker 4y agoSome of my YouTube subscriptions moved over to Nebula so that helps, somewhat, reduce the amount of time I spend on YouTube. But yeah, there needs to be a larger movement to move channels from YouTube to have serious alternatives to YouTube as a user.
- pedalpete 4y ago- Docs/Slides -> Canva - Sites -> Canva - Photos -> potentially in the future... Canva - Browser -> Brave or Firefox I'm curious if people think it is suggested to move away from Chromium completely, or just Google's Chrome?
- brutusurp 4y agoI like Brave. Vivaldi is also good IMO. I want to like Firefox more, however I find myself going back to Brave.
- squalo 4y agoSame. Tried Firefox but ended back with Brave
- elforce002 4y agoBrave is really good. I have almost 2 years using it (I was using DDG before) and I can't complain.
- WorldMaker 4y agoI think it is a good idea for more people to move away from Chromium completely. We're starting to see too many websites written "Only Works in Chrome" and I lived through one "Only Works in One Browser or Reskins of It" epoch already (IE6).
- iLoveOncall 4y agoAlmost none of those are viable alternatives. They're either not free when Google is, a lot more expensive, or have a lot less features. And recommending Microsoft products or apps owned by the CCP as an alternative to Google products is simply ridiculous. I would understand going from Google to open source products, even though I am not an open source fanatic, but going from Google to another privately owned for-profit company makes no sense. Is this written by a guy bitter to have been laid of by Google or something like this?
- warner25 4y agoI too am laughing at the suggestions to swap Google for Microsoft stuff.
- jrockway 4y agoI am probably too far gone to be taken seriously, but my startup got acquired and we had to switch from Google to Microsoft and I actually kind of like the Microsoft stuff. It has dark mode! If you're going to be Last Name, First Name at an 80k employee company, at least your calendar can be visually pleasant to look at.
- iLoveOncall 4y agoI think it's totally fine if your reason for wanting to move away from Google is not ideological or privacy-related. "It's better" is a good reason to switch. But this is clearly not the case in the original article.
- warner25 4y agoSure, I don't think Microsoft's stuff is necessarily terrible. At work I've always been fully immersed in Windows and Office, as both a regular user and IT guy, and it's fine for that. I was even using Windows and Edge on my personal laptop as recently as 2021. But if you're trying to get away from Google as a soulless mega-cap corporation that wants to trick you into giving up more of your data, switching to Microsoft doesn't seem like much of a switch.
- warner25 4y agoThere's no mention of Google Voice. I've been hooked on it for 12 years, with my primary phone number being a Google Voice number for the last 10 years. I've started using a lot of the suggested applications and services - Firefox, DuckDuckGo, Flickr - instead of Google's in recent years. I'm still using Gmail because changing my primary email seems like it would be a pain, but at least I can see that there are some strong competitors for email. Voice, on the other hand, seems like a pretty unique offering.
- berdon 4y agoFwiw, I switched from gmail two years ago and it was relatively painless. It took a couple hours and there were a handful of websites that didn’t allow changing emails (as usernames) but otherwise it was fine. And worth it to no longer get spam.
- kibwen 4y agoWhat did you switch to?
- berdon 4y agoFastmail
- SkyMarshal 4y agoWhat did you change to and which options did you consider? Considering the same, curious what others' experience is.
- SyzygistSix 4y agoFastmail. It was easy and pretty quick.
- client4 4y agoI switched to Migadu and have been happy.
- 4y ago
- knowledge-clay 4y agoAny ideas for Calender alternatives?
- esnowrackley 4y agoFastmail's calendar works for me; offers parity on most features I'm looking for.
- brutusurp 4y agoProtonMail and FastMail both have calendar options.
- Tutanota 4y agoHi Tutanota has a zero-knowledge, fully encrypted calendar. Let us know if you have any questions!
- felixg3 4y agoyup, and its working well, and is not overpriced like other services
- tedivm 4y agoI think Plausible should also be mentioned as a great analytics alternative. It's open source with a paid saas option. https://plausible.io/ https://plausible.io/
- NoboruWataya 4y agoMaps is the only Google service I am hooked on. I use it to get around (both on foot and via public transport) but also to find places to eat and drink when I am in a new area. I love OSM as a project and have contributed to it but it just doesn't compare. Other than that, for me it's mailbox.org for Gmail and Nextcloud hosted on a VPS for Drive and Calendar.
- dashundchen 4y agoLook into Transit app for public transit. The UI for transit wayfinding and exploring nearby stops/lines is way better the Maps in my opinion. For agencies that don't have realtime arrivals, Transit also supports opt-in crowdsourced time estimates.
- emmelaich 4y agoBut why? I'm sure there are reasons, but not mentioned. I for one love the integration in Google stuff. It's under-appreciated.
- sneakerblack 4y agoPersonally? I don't like a single company knowing so much about me & prefer to spread my metadata among them The author likely had some privacy concerns too
- GoblinSlayer 4y agoGoogle can randomly ban you for your safety.
- anonymousiam 4y agoI've been hooked on some Google services since 2010 when I got a Nexus One phone. I liked the calendar and contacts because they were accessible from my other devices. I ported a few of my phone numbers to Google Voice shortly afterward and I liked being able to access voicemail and SMS from my other devices. Sometime last year I noticed that Google Calendar was acting up with Thunderbird so I decided to migrate my calendar and contacts to Owncloud (https://owncloud.com/ https://owncloud.com/). That migration went very smoothly and I've had no trouble accessing my contacts/calendar from desktop, Android, and iOS. Everything works great, and Thunderbird no longer has problems. To get completely off of Google's tit, I need to migrate my Google Voice to something else. I can migrate them to NumberBarn, but that doesn't take care of the spam filtering. Maybe I can use NoMoRobo...
- squalo 4y agoSeen a lot of posts like this over the last couple of years. This is unique in that it recommends several MicroSoft options. That's nuts.
- alecco 4y agoProbable reason: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/03/16/introducing-microsoft-365-copilot-your-copilot-for-work/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/03/16/introducing-micr...