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As a Canadian, I’ve been thinking since last year about migrating to non-US services and applications. My main goal is simply to avoid giving money or data dir
by darthcloud 6mo ago
As a Canadian, I’ve been thinking since last year about migrating to non-US services and applications.
My main goal is simply to avoid giving money or data directly to US corporations. I have no illusions, these non-US services probably still benefit US companies in some ways.
They’re rare, but I’ve consciously decided to stay away from some Canadian alternatives. The main customers of most Canadian tech companies are in the US, and I feel they would happily move there if needed.
I started with this:
Gmail / Drive → Proton Mail / Drive
NameCheap / GoDaddy → Infomaniak
Google Maps → TomTom
Google Chrome → Vivaldi
Google Search → Startpage (Vivaldi default)
GitHub → Codeberg & Codefloe (for private)
I do like Proton Mail. The main thing I hate is how often the app and web versions get out of sync for read and archive states.
I’m really happy with Infomaniak, migrating all my domains was a breeze.
Vivaldi is based on the Chrome codebase, but I really love all the extra customization options. It was a very easy switch.
Startpage took me some time to get used to. It’s not as good as Google, but whatever.
TomTom isn’t great, but it’s not like Maps has been great over the last few years either.
Forgejo is much better than what GitHub has become.
Next, I’m thinking of moving away from Google Photos. I’m considering pCloud for that.
- pkulak 6mo agoI can't recommend Immich enough if you want to move off Google Photos.
- avazhi 6mo ago[flagged]
- fcarraldo 6mo agoWhich of these is Apple?
- __bjoernd 6mo agoHow is Proton a US-controlled company?
- nilslindemann 6mo agoYes, how is Proton a US controlled company? At least in the German Wikipedia they sound like a group of saints.
- QuadmasterXLII 6mo agoThere are words and concepts that cut reality at the seams, and others that feel good and make you dumb as rocks. Virtue signaling came out the gate strong but has fallen solidly i to the second camp.
- reg_dunlop 6mo agoPhrasing this as virtue signaling is a misnomer. I see it as an effort to divest themselves of moral inequity. And the result isn't the point: the effort and the reason for the effort, is. This is the first iteration/calibration of a more conscientious intention. When moral imperative is an unidentifiable road feature on the highway towards wherever the US is going...small efforts matter
- inferniac 6mo ago[flagged]
- ogogmad 6mo agoif a boycott is a virtue signal then your comment is a vice signal
- shikshake 6mo agoVirtue signaling is the worst interpretation you can have of someone attempting to do better. If someone’s trying to make a small impact on the world, shouldn’t you encourage them instead of making fun and claiming they’re just doing it for looks?
- AdamN 6mo agoIf you believe in the moral of it then it's not signaling in the first place. It's only virtue signaling if you do it just to get acceptance or mating or something like that (e.g. I love barbecue but this girl I'm trying to date is vegetarian so I pretend I don't like barbecue to signal that I'm a good match for her). The usage of the term 'virtue signaling' is almost always a sign that the person saying it isn't being intellectually honest - it's usually just meant to be a putdown.
- femiagbabiaka 6mo agoIf we stay on the current path, in a few months tech will start to feel the pain of Trump's rampage. The only redeemable thing about that is that maybe tech workers and Americans generally will finally stop feeling like they're above it all.
- otherme123 6mo agoProton AG, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_AG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_AG, a Swiss company, owned privately by the Proton Foundation https://proton.me/foundation https://proton.me/foundation, is US-controlled? How?
- BrunoBernardino 6mo agoI'm _assuming_ they're just spreading FUD, over some past events [1]. It's not US-controlled, AFAICT. [1]: https://activistchecklist.org/proton/ https://activistchecklist.org/proton/
- bryanrasmussen 6mo agoIf I was outside of the US I would consider it as an effort to reduce risk, not virtue signaling. If I was a citizen of a nation directly and recently threatened by the U.S I would consider it more as a "screw you" than virtue signaling. This is probably because I am not especially caring about virtue, but I do like pointing out ways that alternate explanations for things some people might find virtuous could pertain.
- kannanvijayan 6mo agoI assure you that many Canadians who are making these moves are emitting very little signal outside of their purchasing decisions. This is not some end state of success, but a process. It's people sharing their ideas, thoughts, and strategies on how to accomplish a relatively challenging economic shift. What you are witnessing and commenting on is quite literally the messy business of a market organically evolving and developing. "Not American" is now a selling point for services.
- lkey 6mo agoPeople who don't believe in virtue see all virtuous acts as 'virtue signaling', or, a lie for attention. You are showing us who you are and what you believe, but you are not describing the parent commenter.
- theshrike79 6mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_AG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_AG > Proton AG is a Swiss technology company offering privacy-focused online services and software. It is majority owned by the non-profit Proton Foundation. So how is the US "controlling" Proton, can you enlighten us as you seem to be more knowledgeable about this?
- ecocentrik 6mo agoThe term for this is ethical consumerism or conscious consumerism, defined as purchasing products that align with moral, social, or environmental values, acting as a form of "voting" with one's money. Virtue signaling takes place wherever changes in group behavior are required by changes in conditions but calling it just virtue signaling is reductive. People are moving off of US services because of the behavior of the US government and US citizens.
- ekianjo 6mo ago> Next, I’m thinking of moving away from Google Photos. I’m considering pCloud for that. Maybe try Immich?
- dwayne_dibley 6mo agoSeconded.
- nsbk 6mo agoI'm in the process of migrating to self-hosted immich and the experience is being great so far. If you have a beefy home lab it is incredibly fast and performant. One thing to mention is that you should have a good backup strategy not to risk losing your photo library
- Besticle 6mo agoIf you're going through all that effort why not migrate to open-source/self-hosted?
- kgwxd 6mo agoEmail? The rest of your life will be spent wondering if anyone got your message or if you've missed something important. Registrar, and search? Not possible. Maps? Paper would be more practical. Browser, done. Git, a lot of extra work for no gain.
- bluebarbet 6mo ago>Maps? Paper would be more practical. On the contrary, maps are (IMO) one domain where FOSS is genuinely better. OpenStreetMap data is far more detailed than any corporate map, and the available clients (Osmand in particular) are far more powerful. You-know-who can only compete because of its (admittedly useful) data on businesses. And, alas, because of ignorance among normies, many of whom are still clueless that, for example, for hiking or outdoor wayfinding, there are much better alternatives available.
- delusional 6mo agoWe weren't talking FOSS, we were talking self-hosted, and self-hosting OSM is ridiculous, especially if you want to do routing.
- bluebarbet 6mo agoThe maps can be considered metadata. The data is the points and tracks, which should be self-hostable. I have them synced locally (desktop-mobile). The setup was admittedly an absolute PITA involving shell scripting and Python.
- kgwxd 6mo agoThe map data is great but I guess I really mean navigation, which is... not great.
- wolvoleo 6mo agoYeah I was thinking of getting infomaniak for my mail. I don't really care for the encryption thing of proton (all email comes in in plain text anyway!) and I want to just be able to do plain imap without bridges. But their stuff just feels a bit weird somehow. I didn't really want to commit yet. I'm glad to hear you had good experiences.
- thejohnconway 6mo agoI'm using it Infomaniak, including their KDrive as a Dropbox replacement (with 2TB of data). I've even used their video conferencing app. No complaints so far. All seems to work just fine.
- omnimus 6mo agoThe infomaniak KDrive has also pretty great pricing and surprisingly great linux client (it even supports “online/offline” files.
- wolvoleo 6mo agoInteresting, files on demand is something I'm missing a lot. I'm on BSD though :'( I'll check if it can be made to work (full support is too much to ask I'm sure but perhaps a port can be made).
- frevib 6mo agoProton has mail, calendar, drive, docs, sheets and more coming. Everything is done e2ee where possible. In case of mail, when the peer has no Proton, mail is indeed send plaintext. Mail is stored e2ee on server, so not even Proton can read it. Proton mail has also made PGP very easy to use. It’s Swiss based and a foundation, not a corporation. They’ve done this so they cannot easily be bought. It ticks most boxes in terms of privacy and security.
- Bombthecat 6mo agoProton is moving out of Swiss, because of privacy concerns and new laws... Just fyi
- butILoveLife 6mo ago[flagged]
- argomo 6mo agoNote that populist demagogue started a trade war and threatened allies with invasion. That tends to put a damper on friendship. And that's before the idiotic blunder with Hormuz.
- thejohnconway 6mo agoMaybe Americans don't really get this, but the Greenland stuff was a very, very big deal. The rest of NATO was staring down the barrel of the unthinkable: war with the United States. For what? Some lib owning? A bit of fun? A real estate deal? The sense of betrayal is very strong, more than the politicians are letting on.
- QuarterReptile 6mo agoThe Diego Garcia stuff is a very, very big deal. I think it's unreasonable to draw the comparison between the exceptionally short-sighted Brits and the uncommonly prudent Danes. But hypothesizing Trump Tower Thule as the motive is ridiculous.
- arethuza 6mo ago"exceptionally short-sighted Brits" Probably something along the lines of "nice nuclear deterrent shame if it was to stop working" or "nice carriers, shame if the only aeroplanes that can fly from them stopped working"....
- thejohnconway 6mo agoI don't understand your comment.
- QuarterReptile 6mo agoDiego Garcia is an island of exceptional strategic importance to the West. When it eventually gets granted to a client state of China, that will steadily degrade the effectiveness of bases there. I expect slower movement than the time the UK promised to protect the rights of Hong Kong citizens, but that is a matter of degree. I am not aware of Denmark giving meaningful control of Greenland to China or Russia, nor or any plans to push the US out: therefore, while I think the principle is worth considering, I find it to be a small concern not worth angering allies over. Does that answer your statement of confusion?
- mentalgear 6mo agoFor Photos, consider Ente (e2ee). Instead of Startpage, try DDG (DuckDuckGo) - been using it now for several years instead of Google as I found no difference in search quality.
- wccrawford 6mo agoTheir whole point was to avoid US companies.
- dv_dt 6mo agoConsider ecosia for search. It's not perfect but is decent for most general searches
- cicko 6mo agoHasn't TomTom completely pivoted to OpenStreetMap? From direct contact, I know that they are very active in OSM communities now.
- erikvanoosten 6mo agoOSM is one of multiple data sources for TomTom.
- jandrewrogers 6mo agoTomTom isn't OSM, they just use OSM as one input among many into their mapping model. OSM has significant limitations as a standalone mapping model but many companies find it useful for augmenting more sophisticated mapping models.
- commandlinefan 6mo ago> avoid giving money You're paying for any of these?
- hedora 6mo agoMost of those services are paid by terrible people when you use them. Look at their revenue breakdowns.
- boringg 6mo agoThis doesn't make a lot of sense: "They’re rare, but I’ve consciously decided to stay away from some Canadian alternatives. The main customers of most Canadian tech companies are in the US, and I feel they would happily move there if needed." So in an effort to veer from the US based on idealogical positions you wouldn't support your own countrymen because you think in some future state that said copmany might hypothetically move to the US? Canadians unable to support Canadians is what everyone around the world should read from this comment. Tall Poppy Syndrome in its purest.
- joe_mamba 6mo agoIsn't it compounded with issue that something like 75% of UW grads move to the US for work?
- boringg 6mo agoIm not sure I follow your point exactly?
- sodapopcan 6mo agoAgreed, this is a VERY odd statement. There are a bunch of Canadian companies that have been here for a long time. I don't have the data but would DNS and hosting providers like EasyDNS and HostPappa really have primarily US customers?
- bluebarbet 6mo ago>What utter BS Consider for a moment how you would feel if, after carefully composing and sharing your thoughts in good faith, you received this response.
- boringg 6mo agoIm sorry but saying you won't support your own people because you THINK they MIGHT move to the US is BS (I removed it originally because I toned down my knee jerk reaction but I defend it as you brought it up). I hope OP has enough emotional capability to handle some gentle feedback. FWIW in case you are unfamiliar with it -- Canada has a history of not supporting its own products and companies - so this sentiment expressed above is tough one to swallow given the exceptional talent and capability of Canadians and some countries efforts to undermine that.
- Deeds67 6mo ago[dead]
- highmastdon 6mo agoFyi, your bottom bar with links isn't responsive causing annoying behaviour with horizontal scroll on mobile phone
- Deeds67 6mo agoThanks for the hint, I fixed it
- Bombthecat 6mo agoImmich would be one, if they would allow photo compression... Insane that they don't even allow an option parameter Edit: oh just saw, it's a fork of immich! Cool!
- Deeds67 6mo agoGo ahead and make a feature request for it, sounds like something I could build soon :)
- DrammBA 6mo agoWhat are you adding on top of immich?
- Deeds67 6mo agoI have a LOT planned (see the roadmap for a sneak peak https://opennoodle.de/roadmap https://opennoodle.de/roadmap). My first focus is sharing, search and discoverability. The biggest issue is that I have thousands of photos but I don't have a good way of filtering by person, date, location, and finding exactly what I'm looking for. Basically browsing my photos like I would browse an online store like Zalando. Search for something and refine with filters. In addition - I implemented S3-like storage. Makes it cheap and easy to host in the cloud.
- detectivestory 6mo agoI've moved to pCloud for photos and I've found it to be a good alternative. One frustrating thing is that if you are cycling through your photos on the default pcloud app, they are usually slow to render which can be frustrating. Playing music on the app is also a little frustrating. It works, but it it's not an amazing UX. Other than that I am completely content with pCloud though, and I would recommend it. One other thing to be made aware of is that the macOS ecosystem seems to be a little hostile towards pCloud and it seems to be fighting a never ending battle in order to the get the remote drive functioning reliably there. It works, but it can be a little annoying at times.
- mft_ 6mo ago> the macOS ecosystem seems to be a little hostile towards pCloud and it seems to be fighting a never ending battle in order to the get the remote drive functioning reliably there pCloud seems to have been having a few wobbles in the past few months, and it's unclear to me whether the root cause is external or internal. Two different Windows machines both needed manual removal and reinstallation, and the Mac installation needed manually updating to a later version due to (apparently) an SSL certificate renewal. FWIW the current version on my Mac (on Sequoia) seems solid outside of rarely needing to select 'Enable Drive' from the menu.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 6mo agoJust heads up, pCloud throttles you heavily if you upload more than a certain amount of data per month or week or whatever. I have been their customer for a long time, with terabytes available in my account, but when I start to put dyson sphere program save files in there which changed often and were large, suddenly it started taking very long to upload. I have 1gbit at home and it works flawlessly with google drive and my nextcloud instance, so it's them.
- neonstatic 6mo agoFor email I have been quite pleased with RunBox (Norway)
- Igor_kh 6mo agoI was a Runbox customer for several years and recently switched to Mailbox and never looked back. Runbox is nice, but I had enough of reliability issues, and a few emails got lost.
- expedition32 6mo agoThis is why I'm sticking to Spotify. Maybe corporations can start to market this: we are not an American company.
- danilocesar 6mo agoPcloud is a security nightmare. If you really have to use it, add your own crypto layer on top of it. Gocryptfs works well for that.
- PLMUV9A4UP27D 6mo agoCan you motivate why Pcloud is a security nightmare?
- danilocesar 6mo agoA couple of years ago someone raised evidence that pcloud was processing documents stored in their servers. They created that "paid cryptography addon" later, but it's hard to trust at this point.
- dzjkb 6mo agoI've recently moved my storage to Jottacloud (Norway), highly recommend - they do - gdrive style storage - dropbox style synced folders - photo app/backups - PC folder backups with apps for mac/win and a cli for linux
- CIARobotFish 6mo agoI've more or less made a similar migration towards non-US alternatives for most of my services. In my case, I switched from GitHub to Worktree (https://worktree.ca/ https://worktree.ca/).
- awongh 6mo agoI'm still waiting and hoping that open street map becomes a viable alternative to google maps- it would be great to get a firefox of mapping (maybe not the best analogy, but....) I definitely know that an open mapping solution could gain traction and be supported by bigger companies that would use it. It seems like a good candidate for the kind of collective OSS work that supports other projects- that there are enough big-enough companies out there that want an open non-google reliant mapping solution that are willing to pool resources. I know that with mapbox and others that active work is being done, but it just doesn't quite seem like it's there yet.
- arielcostas 6mo agoWhat do you miss about Google Maps in OSM? Just business information (schedules, contact info, reviews...), or something else?
- snowpid 6mo agoSomebody else, but there is no good OS mobile app for OSM. CoMaps is clunky currently.
- patmorgan23 6mo agoLyft pays people to help map in OSM. meta and Microsoft have both made big contributions as well (like allowing the use of Bing imagery)
- chucksmash 6mo agoAmazon also uses and contributes edits to OSM.
- jorvi 6mo agoIt doesn't matter if Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook contribute or pay huge sums. Even Apple Maps is heavily, heavily behind Google Maps simply because very few users are entering Point of Interest info into Apple Maps. New restaurant opens, or store closes, or opening hours change? Google Maps has the updated info within a few days. Apple Maps in a year or two, maybe. That's the moat. The only way either Apple or the other corpos catch up is by offering massive financial incentives for their users to contribute PoI data.
- carlosjobim 6mo agoGoogle has two products without competition: YouTube and Google Maps. Don't waste your time trying different map services. Everything else is super easy to switch to better alternatives, especially search, e-mail and browser.
- gib444 6mo agoOrganic Maps is great for offline. It even did better directions in Europe recently, because Google Maps does not have an "avoid unpaved roads" option. Apple Maps does driving directions way better in general - better visuals, speech etc. It does foreign pronunciations better too IIRC. It's even not bad as a PWA on Android ( https://maps.apple.com https://maps.apple.com ). Google Maps loves to say take eg "exit Via Emilio Enrico" on some random roundabout in some random Italian town, seemingly with no idea that there are big signs to eg "VERONA". The street name is often totally useless. I also find Google Maps does a great job at directing me into traffic. Like, not unexpected traffic at all. Google Maps is great at giving you terrible recommendations because of the heavily, heavily filtered/gamed reviews however. Nothing more untrustworthy than a 4.7 star review on Google. And of course there is also Mapy, HERE, TomTom etc...
- carlosjobim 6mo agoOrganic Maps is great for offline navigation, agreed. Also better than the rest for hiking trails. But it doesn't have anywhere near the features of Google Maps. I wanted to like Apple Maps, but when you are traveling and actually need maps to find your way around, it's unusable. For example visiting some of the top cities in the world, and Apple Maps doesn't have public transport info. Or outdated business information. HERE maps are unusable on mobile because of whacky two-finger zoom and pan algorithms which seem to be taken from a different decade.
- gib444 6mo agoMaybe you could enumerate with more detail exactly how Google Maps is unmatched and what features you need? You haven't said much so far. You also won't really acknowledge negatives of it so I think you are not being very objective. Yes public transport is a good one but only perhaps unmatched by breadth Citymapper is excellent for public transport. Google Maps relies on business owners updating details too, often outdated and incorrect. They also doesn't publish a lot of helpful negative reviews Yes basically you need more than one app for the different things but I prefer that to one single and frankly mediocre app
- gattilorenz 6mo agoTo you people who moved email to a different provider… how did you do that, practically? Email signature, reply from another address and hope your contacts pick it up, or something else? How well did it work? I have been a user of gmail since you needed an invitation to register, and even though I have felt for years the pressure to de-google myself, I find it a daunting task due to the amount of people/services that think my email account is gmail, and forever will be.
- jagermo 6mo agoIf you use their domain, its a paint and you need to do the steps you mention. If you have your own domain for emails, its basically a line in the dns settings and your emails go to the new provider. Everyone should own their E-Mail domain
- philwelch 6mo agoThis is a lot simpler if you own a personal domain name. You’re still going to have pain setting that up the first time, but afterwards any future migrations will be much easier.
- Aachen 6mo agoWhen first migrating away from Hotmail as a teenager, I just registered for new accounts/contracts on my own domain and migrated only the stuff I was still actively using At some point I downloaded the emails from Hotmail by adding the account to Thunderbird and copying the contents to a local folder. Probably imapsync or some other dedicated tool would be more reliable but it seems to have worked for me (don't forget to also copy the sent folder). I don't really look back at it anymore, after a few years nothing of interest lands there. It's still out there though. Data hoarder issues with definitively deleting the data from it I'd keep the account name just in case someone finds that it can be re-registered and used to gain access via password reset somewhere
- darthcloud 6mo agoI was on gmail since the invitation too. Using their domain. I started to use my own domain within Gmail 2 years ago. Transitioned things I cared about to use that email at that time. Then this years I moved to Proton using that domain. And I'm forwarding Gmail to proton indefinitely. I told my family, friends to start using that address going forward. Slowly but surely as I get email into my gmail folder on proton I take the time to go change the address. The big change is using an address from you own domain.
- KomoD 6mo ago> Google Search → Startpage (Vivaldi default) Startpage is owned by an American advertising company https://system1.com https://system1.com