Ask HN: How to ditch Big Tech for secure, privacy-focused alternatives?

[dori23]

I’m trying to move away from Big Tech in my personal life (i.e. Google, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, X, etc). However, finding a user-friendly, privacy-conscious ecosystem that covers essentials like email, messaging, documents, cloud storage, messaging, etc. hasn’t been straightforward.

I’ve researching various open-source tools and smaller providers, but it seems tricky to match Big Tech’s convenience without sacrificing security or usability. Some of the smaller providers also bring their own privacy concerns.

Have you managed to leave Big Tech entirely—or at least minimize reliance on their services—and still keep a smooth workflow? If so, what does your setup look like? Any recommendations or lessons learned are greatly appreciated.

[znpy]

I run 90% of a communication stack on a 10 years old hp microserver gen8. I run a pretty vanilla rocky linux installation and run stuff that’s not available in repositories in unprivileged (rootless) podman containers. I mostly only serve myself.

Mail (postfix/dovecot) is cheap. Most other things i have nextcloud for (with acceptable performance). I ran a matrix server for a while but dropped it since none of my friends used that so it was essentially useless.

I can do most things without relying on big tech.

The expensive parts are:

- disks. I have four disks.

- time to learn stuff (it takes a while but some knowledge lasts pretty much forever)

- time for maintenance

Edit: leaving the big tech is really going DIY, learning how the individual things work and then plumbing them together. Anything other than that is largely snakeoil from what i’ve seen. Some friends tell me modern mid-high end NASes might do some of the things you like.

[GianFabien]

I have very similar concerns to the OP.

The core of the problem is that the Big Tech solutions are funded by massive advertising revenues. People in general prefer free to paid solutions. Thus the small-tech companies are either trying to provide services on minuscule ad revenue and/or charge the vastly smaller user-base. Either way they cannot match BigTech for reach, etc.

My solution is to use Gmail for non-critical emails, iMail for important emails. Some FB Messenger for contact with distant relatives. For the rest I simply self-host. No cloud storage (portable HDs are cheap and easy to use). LibreOffice for what little office automation I need. And of course running Debian Linux.

[skydhash]

Unless it's for communication and collaboration, I don't care much about online services. I moved away from gmail mostly because google is trying to bundle everything there and the fact that trigger-happy bans. I use a couple of other service for backup, while I kept Google for easy collaboration with others (rarely happens, and I usually kept a backup of the documents), Youtube on the TV, and temp accounts. Almost everything else is local, shared via SMB or SFTP. I have a VPS for git repos (via ssh).

[dotcoma]

Tuta.com for emails, Mega for backups, Bitwarden for passwords, Iridium as my browser.

Deleted Facebook, never used Instagram, Snapchat nor TikTok, I access YouTube via DuckDuckGo’s ad-less interface, I am quitting X.

You can’t really do without WhatsApp, at least in my experience.

[dori23]

Thanks for sharing! I'll look into these.

A noob q: Is there a reason why you choose Iridium over Firefox for your browser? I've been using Firefox and thought they were pretty good with security & privacy.

I was thinking Telegram instead of WhatsApp, but there are so many WhatsApp-only groups that I would miss out if I left. You're probably right about it being irreplaceable atm.

[dotcoma]

Iridium: I use bookmarks quite a bit and like the way Chrome (and Iridium) do bookmarks.