Ask HN: How to move away from Google

It was quite a roller coaster to move to alternative services, and also giving up on all social media. But after a while you get used to things and find handy alternatives (like MagicEarth for maps, this app is great!). It feels liberating and I'm more at peace knowing I'm in control of my data. I keep reading these anxiety inducing Google account terminations for years, they also motivated my move (in addition to the privacy benefits). Sure, this could happen to me to with the service providers I use, but at least they have human point of contacts and all my data is backed up and ready to move to another services.

I'm definitely up to share my experience and write a full article about this. Hopefully in the coming month when I find some time :-)

IMVHO you should not look at "alternatives" in the sense of "substitute a WebApp with another" but in workflow terms:

- emails? They are normally valuable tool and personal stuff, they must not be outside your control as much as possible so GMail or Proton change nothing if you use them with their webmail. Just buy a domain, choose a hosted mail service, just because host one yourself is not that easy these days, sync or better grab your remote inbox to a homeserver and use your mail locally in your desktop. The local part means sync against your server the entire maildir, use a local MUA, with good search, tagging etc capabilities, my personal choice is notmuch, to sync mail muchsync, to grab mail fetchmail+MailDrop (but you might like OfflineIMAP or MBSync). Webmail served by your homeserver (i.e. MailPie or Modoboa or even the simple RoundCube) as a last resort if you aren't at your desktop;

- calendar/agenda? Similarly, personally I use org-mode, far more powerful than modern calendar, but again you might prefer different things, thou local and synced not centrally served.

- Drive? To share files there are various options from classic WebDAV to third party services no reason to be tied to one in particular if that's not yours, the rest of Drive is not really a thing IMVHO

- search? Just use Google Search is not more evil than any other player, there is no real open choice there, YaCy while have a public distributed network count just too few participants to be an alternative and the web is the web, you can't run your own.

- Maps? Again not much real alternatives, a PND is good enough for car navigation, for the rest there are very few other maps services but none as powerful as Maps just due to the scale. OSM is hyper-good in limited areas, very lacking elsewhere so not a real option.

- notes? The best I know are again Emacs/org-mode/org-roam etc combo, TiddlyWiki with a daemon to serve it might be another option, Zim another more limited but still light and classic for certain users.

Looking for alternatives in terms of substituting a player with another is a game loosed from start and does not solve anything: companies are not "good" or "evil" they just follow their interest, some might be less friendly then others, but interests in the game remain the same.

There have been attempts by police where I live to exploit such setups as loopholes to request data from companies in foreign jurisdictions that they wouldn't be able to obtain from domestic ones, and since there is no "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine over here, such evidence has actually been admitted in court, or at the least used to enable parallel construction. Given that the Aussies are doubling down on their police state, I'd rather not expose myself to such shenanigans (and if my data ends up in some predictive policing data warehouse, I'd prefer if it was just one, not two).

As for advertisement surveillance, I'd have to take Fastmail's word, whereas with a domestic provider, there's the GDPR that is a lot harder to evade for them than for some Australian company.

Any suggestions around the super slow Tutanota clients? It takes sometimes like 20 seconds for it to load the list of emails. Doesn’t sound like a lot but it adds up.

India.