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by navidfarhadi 2862 days ago
I’d recommend taking a look at https://www.privacytools.io. It has quite a few recommendations for different services that respect your privacy, many of which are FOSS.

For e-mail, calendars, and contacts I’ve migrated over to FastMail. In my opinion the web client and help articles are far superior to Google’s offerings. You can even use your own domain along with 100+ aliases.

For cloud storage I have migrated from Google Drive to iCloud Drive. Obviously this is not FOSS but it gets the job done for me.

There are some Google services that are irreplaceable for me though so I continue to use them. These are Google Maps, Voice, YouTube, Translate, and Docs.

3 comments

I will second FastMail and the claim that its web client is superior to GMail. In fact, the entire service is superior to GMail. It's faster, the UI is snappier, IMAP integration is better, the features are way more advanced, etc. It even lets you use a custom anti-spam servicename@username.mydomain.com scheme natively.

For file syncing, I quite like Dropbox and Syncthing.

>For cloud storage I have migrated from Google Drive to iCloud Drive

I've moved to Nextcloud. It is completely open source, but you need to run it on your own server. Since it's provided in a Snap package, setup only takes a few minutes. I personally use a $5 per month Linode, but many people opt to use something like a Raspberry Pi.

Having your own server also allows you to ditch third party email and VPN providers, though those are more complicated to set up.

A potential alternative to Google translate is deepl. It doesn't do website translation like Google translate does in Chrome but I've found it to be better for texts in English, French and German.