[darthcloud]

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.

[detectivestory]

I'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_]

> 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]

Just 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.

[mentalgear]

For 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]

Their whole point was to avoid US companies.

[dv_dt]

Consider ecosia for search. It's not perfect but is decent for most general searches

[CIARobotFish]

I'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/).

[ekianjo]

> Next, I’m thinking of moving away from Google Photos. I’m considering pCloud for that.

Maybe try Immich?

[nsbk]

I'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

[dwayne_dibley]

Seconded.

[awongh]

I'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.

[patmorgan23]

Lyft 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]

Amazon also uses and contributes edits to OSM.

[jorvi]

It 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.

[chucksmash]

> It doesn't matter if Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook contribute or pay huge sums.

It may not matter for your purposes (i.e. replacing Google-Maps-the-product in your daily use as a consumer).

I'd naively expect that having hundreds of thousands of Amazon drivers dogfooding these maps daily does help with data quality though. So maybe OSM dataset works best as a Google Maps replacement if you can shoehorn your usage into something that overlaps with the things a gigantic logistics operation cares about.

[philwelch]

A few years ago I got annoyed at Google and switched to Apple Maps. Earlier this year I got annoyed with Apple Maps and tried Google Maps again before switching back. Point of interest data was a minor factor in all of this. It might be enough to lock me into using Google to find local businesses I didn’t know about before, but that doesn’t force me to use Google Maps for turn by turn navigation.

[arielcostas]

What do you miss about Google Maps in OSM? Just business information (schedules, contact info, reviews...), or something else?

[snowpid]

Somebody else, but there is no good OS mobile app for OSM. CoMaps is clunky currently.

[dzjkb]

I'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

[pkulak]

I can't recommend Immich enough if you want to move off Google Photos.

[commandlinefan]

> avoid giving money

You're paying for any of these?

[hedora]

Most of those services are paid by terrible people when you use them.

Look at their revenue breakdowns.

[gattilorenz]

To 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.

[Wool2662]

Yes, pretty much. I bought a domain to make sure I only have to do this once and parked it with Infomaniak.

Then I setup a new mail account (by now I abandoned Proton for Infomaniak there as well)

The next year I just kept responding with my new email address, asking people to update their contact data and each time I logged in somewhere I changed my email address. This went really well, just 1 or 2 services where I couldn't change it because they only accept the big providers, no custom domains.

In the end the first 3 weeks were really painful, afterwards it was smooth sailing.

Since then I've swiched provider quite a bit from Proton to Zoho and now to Infomaniak (where I will stay for a long time I think) and each of those changes took me about 2h each time.

So in sumnary, you will curse yourself for a few weeks and thank yourself later!

[Aachen]

When 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

[jagermo]

If 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]

This 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.

[darthcloud]

I 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.

[js-utm32]

I auto-forwarded to protonmail and replied from there. It took two years before I stopped receiving email that way.

[cicko]

Hasn't TomTom completely pivoted to OpenStreetMap? From direct contact, I know that they are very active in OSM communities now.

[jandrewrogers]

TomTom 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.

[erikvanoosten]

OSM is one of multiple data sources for TomTom.

[wolvoleo]

Yeah 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.

[frevib]

Proton 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.

[wolvoleo]

I only want it for the mail. Everything else I self-host anyway. It's just that mail is hard with bad actors like Microsoft demanding certain reputation standards (e.g. you have to send X amount of legit mail per month or you get blocked even if they've never seen spam from you!). But for mail the encryption is just useless in my opinion.

The encrypted mail storage adds no value for me because I pull all my mail from the server immediately anyway. It's just a big hassle to deal with that bridge. And when a mail comes in they have to handle it in plaintext (and also, the other party sees it which is 90% of the time microsoft or google or another bad actor). I just view email as a lost cause really.

The only thing I get from Proton is the VPN.

[exceptione]

> Mail is stored e2ee on server

Exclusively, or do they keep caches around? I am asking since everything is clear text in the webmail. I wonder if they handle the rare case of proton to proton (encrypted) mail differently from regular unencrypted mail. I assume they have to decrypt a master key stored on the server with your password, and then decrypt every encrypted email on the fly on the server, or they have to send the master key to the client side.

Now think that through when you have thousands of searchable e-mails, sorted arbitrarily. I won't say it is impossible, but I think that maintaining plain text indexes rather than encrypted ones are really tempting.

[frevib]

You’re post is full of misconceptions and mistakes.

Mail is stored e2ee exculsively. The’ve been summoned to hand over mail many times, which they weren’t able to do. Quick search on Ecosia and find the articles.

They don’t have a master key or else the whole e2ee story is a fad, which it isn’t. The Proton code is in Github so you can check how it works yourself. Part of the password is used to decrypt the data.

Search is done client side. You have to download a big search index in order to have proper search. The iOS app doesn’t support downloading the index so search is limited there.

Please think and do some work before you reply.

[exceptione]

> They don’t have a master key or else the whole e2ee story is a fad, which it isn’t

You can store an encrypted master key (like Luks), download that key to the client and decrypt it there. Or you can have it in decrypted in server memory, but only during an interactive session with the user. But that quickly turns into a fad, as you pointed out, which was exactly my question.

> The Proton code is in Github so you can check how it works yourself. Please think and do some work before you reply.

I asked a simple question, so that at others could chime in about the exact details and limits. I don't understand why that was highly offensive to you, but I assume it is something like a Monday Mood.

[pnw]

I love Proton but it's really low on usability since their calendar doesn't integrate with anything (by design). If you are used to managing a busy calendar it's quite a shock. And their docs and sheets apps are extremely minimal and basic.

And of course the recent allegations that they hand over your metadata on >90% of requests. See https://x.com/DoingFedTime/status/2030108076531995016

[frevib]

Calender is basic indeed, but good enough for a family sharing a calendar. Proton is working on a new calendar app which is coming out this year.

[pnw]

That's good news!

[Lapel2742]

> Proton has mail, calendar, drive, docs, sheets and more coming

As of today, there is no official Proton Drive client for Linux that I'm aware of. There is unofficial support via Rclone, but it is still beta and I try to avoid mounting via Rclone anyway. I recall that it wasn't a really convincing experience when I tried it with OneDrive.

[frevib]

Proton Drive for Linux (and Drive SDK) are announced for this year. Unfortunately not more specifically than “this year”.

[Lapel2742]

> Proton Drive for Linux (and Drive SDK) are announced for this year. Unfortunately not more specifically than “this year”.

I hope you are right. I'm tired of waiting for a product I paid for while the company is working on new products instead of finishing the one that is halfway there.

[Bombthecat]

Proton is moving out of Swiss, because of privacy concerns and new laws...

Just fyi

[frevib]

They aren’t. They do have made their IT such that they can move very easily. If the Swiss government will pass worse privacy laws, Proton said they will move to Norway or Germany.

[thejohnconway]

I'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]

The infomaniak KDrive has also pretty great pricing and surprisingly great linux client (it even supports “online/offline” files.

[wolvoleo]

Interesting, 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).

[expedition32]

This is why I'm sticking to Spotify.

Maybe corporations can start to market this: we are not an American company.

[Besticle]

If you're going through all that effort why not migrate to open-source/self-hosted?

[kgwxd]

Email? 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]

>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]

We weren't talking FOSS, we were talking self-hosted, and self-hosting OSM is ridiculous, especially if you want to do routing.

[bluebarbet]

The 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]

The map data is great but I guess I really mean navigation, which is... not great.

[bluebarbet]

Yes, that's what's commonly said.

Some anecdata I can offer: since last year I have used exclusively Osmand for navigating over 3000 km of cycle touring, on roads and paths of all types. The most common problem that arises is wrongly tagged surfaces (and occasionally access rights) for tracks and paths, i.e. for "roads" that do not even appear on the corporate maps. There is no comparison in terms of detail. Obviously this is less relevant for regular car drivers.

And certainly the situation for FOSS public-transit navigation is still quite poor.

[habi]

> And certainly the situation for FOSS public-transit navigation is still quite poor.

https://transitous.org/ (https://github.com/public-transport/transitous) works quite well.

[brailsafe]

> Git, a lot of extra work for no gain.

I guess it depends a bit on scale and additional feature requirements, but a remote git repo is pretty trivial to self-host, no?

I have my personal ones sitting on a standard vps, but they could be anywhere

[lostmsu]

I am a little optimistic about radicle for Git

[carlosjobim]

Google 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]

Organic 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 ).

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]

Organic 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]

Maybe 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

[carlosjobim]

There's plenty of negatives for Google Maps. None of those are deal-breakers, while the negatives of other apps are deal-breakers.

Negatives of Google Maps:

- Awful graphical interface

- Bad performance

- Ads

- Offline maps could be better implemented

Features where other apps fail, but Google Map works well:

- Unable to zoom or pan map because of janky response. This core feature needs to be right, or the app is unusable.

- No public transport integration. Makes the app unusable if you're on vacation in a different country without your vehicle. Apple Maps fails hard on this. Which is when you are most in need of good maps.

- No routing or bad routing, or routing only for cars and not for bicycles or public transport. Deal breaker for everyday use. Organic Maps has awful routing.

- No business information or outdated business information. For example, Apple Maps will ignore or reject updates which you as a business send to them, using the Apple Business account.

- No or few or outdated photos for businesses. Reviews aren't that reliable, as you mention. But photos will tell you many times what you want to know.

[gib444]

Fair enough. I don't think we are going to agree on much nor convince each other because:

- You want one app that works almost everywhere in the world and UX is paramount to you. Less privacy and mediocrity is fine

- I am happy to use more specific apps that excel at specific functions, and accept some lower performance/UX for the £0 I paid and £0 I paid in giving up my privacy (with the exception of Citymapper - I don't use it myself though. I figure out each city's public transport myself, or talk to staff).

We'll just go around in circles calling out the pluses/negatives of each app

There are absolutely good (enough) alternatives to Google Maps though, I won't budge on that.

edit: I'll also plug newly-discovered Gnome Maps on the desktop. It does walking/cycling/car/public transport routing too, though no idea how well. No satellite though. Also, Comaps has emerged as an Organic Maps fork due to some governance disagreements

[brailsafe]

> Google has two products without competition: YouTube and Google Maps.

I've actually found great success in migrating to nothing from YouTube. Specifically I've found nothing to have a much less insidious algorithm, no shorts, no comment section, no upvotes or downvotes, no creepy Mr beast thumbnails, it's quite refreshing. If you still want cideos that are exclusively on YT, you can simply skip the website and access them via other means.

[carlosjobim]

Do you mean like in not watching any video or film at all? I'm not sure that this is the best option, since there is a lot of information which is better expressed by moving pictures than by text.

As for the algorithm, it is actually great if you take care to nudge it with subscriptions, likes and dislikes.

[brailsafe]

For the last few months I've simply stopped accessing YouTube directly. No website, no app. I still watch some videos that are embedded on articles or whatever, and occasionally download specific ones, but I don't see anything that's core to the YT experience, like subs or shorts or anything like that.

It's almost unavoidable to encounter videos that are only hosted on YT, but if I can't watch them without accessing any YT interface, I just don't watch them, I've just decided it's not worth it. I also haven't done anything specific to restrict the website, I've just mentally banned it as a simple rule to follow. It's an insidious service imo that uses casino tactics to steal my time and attention. What I occasionally want is videos, but their entire service beyond that provides only negative value to me.

I don't feel like I've missed much.

For insta, I've always just used their website, which is so terrible, and the content so inconsequential, that it's not a big deal anymore in terms of stealing my attention.

[KomoD]

> Google Search → Startpage (Vivaldi default)

Startpage is owned by an American advertising company https://system1.com

[danilocesar]

Pcloud 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]

Can you motivate why Pcloud is a security nightmare?

[danilocesar]

A 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.

[neonstatic]

For email I have been quite pleased with RunBox (Norway)

[Igor_kh]

I 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.

[boringg]

This 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.

[tamimio]

> Tall Poppy Syndrome

I learned something new today, thanks! I did face this a LOT in Canadian workforce, never knew it had a term, but the way you get undermined and attacked for not being an average is crazy, taking/sharing the credit, and pushing you on the sides, excluding you from meetings and all shenanigans haha. Completely the opposite in the US, not just productivity wise, but US companies embrace individualism and “as long as you get shit done”, go wild! It’s why US companies do better, I doubt it’s the market size as always brought as a justification, I am sure if Canadian companies did better they will have US based customers too just like Switzerland had European ones.

[sodapopcan]

Agreed, 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]

>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]

Im 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.

[joe_mamba]

Isn't it compounded with issue that something like 75% of UW grads move to the US for work?

[boringg]

Im not sure I follow your point exactly?