I created an infographic of privacy-forward alternatives to Google products…and would love your feedback.
Is it easy to use? Enough white space? Intuitive? Sharable? Is there anything I’m missing?
The infographic image in this post is NOT clickable. The link above will give you a downloadable PDF with working hyperlinks.
Re: the legend, “easy set-up/use” means either that this is a big part of the alternative product’s branding, or I’ve used it myself and found it easy.
Since you included decentralized solutions like Peertube, maybe add SearXNG instances for searches ?
Hmm…Peertube was so easy for me to search and use—I think a lot of people wouldn’t even know it’s decentralized—but the SearXNG website is much more complicated. I’m looking for non-Google products that are easy for the average, non-tech person. Think SearXNG would work?
All they need to know is basically “Just pick an instance close to you and be done, and if it ever stops working well just pick another”, which is the same thing as when creating an account on the Fediverse except that instances come and go a lot more.
So it would depends entirely on whether they can find the list of public instances easily… which is admittedly a problem 😅
You’re right about the website, there is a link to the list of public instances on https://docs.searxng.org/ but it’s a bit drowned amidst all the other stuff. If I was a regular user I would take one look at the website and run away really fast.
The Wikipedia page on SearXNG does link it, in the section about instances, but I’m not sure how many people would check the wikipedia page rather than the website
Thanks! I can’t imagine even explaining to my mom what an instance is, much less how to use one. Maybe the situation will change when more and more people start joining these sites. But I will list SearXNG on the links page!
As a software dev… im still too stupid to use searxng. Guess its more of a “If its not that easy I wont go further learning it”.
Maybe it was a lot of features missing that I missed from Duckduckgo.
OK, I’m glad it’s not just me. :D
Nextcloud replaces Photo’s, Drive and docs.
And more
Oh, perfect!
Grr, I’m trying to sign up for an account to try it out and it keeps failing! I’ll try again later, it sounds even better than I thought.
Isn’t Grayjay a frontend for YouTube?
Aha! Yes, it is. Any suggestions for non-YouTube video platforms?
Maybe Peertube or Odyssey.
would you mind if i translate this to my language and use it as a poster?
What’s your language? Would the products.links still make sense to readers of this new version?
In any case, it’s fine with me as long as you’re not making. monetary profit from the poster. Also, will you please share a copy I can add to my website?
Also, I made a poster of a similar infographic I created several years ago when I owned a content studio…I forgot all about that and think I may do it for the English version as well! I can sell it at cost. A friend also suggested I turn it into a mouse pad.
korean. I might have to change a few things… I’ll be running some small local campaign at work about degoogling/free software etc and there are surprisingly very few good graphical contents I could find and this looks great.
I’ll get back to you if I actually get to use this. Thanks :)
I see Ground News recommended all the time but for some reason i cannot trust it, idk why
nah With all respect, as a proton user, proton docs sucks ass. but that may change in the future
Now make a EU version.
Maybe after this!
Any alternatives for Google Tasks?
Ooh, good question! It looks like Nextcloud has a tasks app. I can’t fit every product on the infographic, but may add this to the links website page.
It’s contacts syncing that I’m stuck on. Hoping to do something with a box running OMV but I’ve never come across anything so simple as Google Contacts 😔
The capitalization for OsmAnd should be corrected. Please?
For news I would advice using the newstool MiniFlux.
MiniFlux
That looks awesome…but also complicated. I’m looking for things that, say, my mom could figure out. (She can’t understand how to copy/paste, but would like to leave the Google ecosystem.0 :) Maybe someone should create a similar graphic for more tech-savvy people?
In the map area, I have been trying all of the proposed alternatives but ended up using Magic Earth as my main alternative on Android. For walking, I use OsmAnd+.
Thanks, I’ll check out Magic Earth!
Magic Earth is great, but unfortunately, it isn’t open source. I’ve been using Mapy and it’s far from prefect, but I think it’s heading in the right direction.
Y’all should probably stop mentioning proton
I know there has been some political controversy around them lately, and that for email Tuta is recommended over Proton Mail—I do mention both of these facts in DISENGAGE: Opting Out—and Finding New Options—to Reclaim Your Life from Spammers, Scammers, Intrusive Marketers and Big Tech, which I’m trying to promote through the infographic. But overall I’ve been happy with Proton’s suite of products as compared to the relevant Google products.
As someone who wants to drop Proton VPN and has stopped using their mail in favor of mailbox.org, I think we should still mention them, just with an asterisk. People deserve to make their own choice about if they wish to support him or not. At least it’s non-profit now.
I really wanna stop using the VPN and go to Mullvad (since they’ve proved they have no logs), but they don’t offer port forwarding anymore, and the only other option is AirVPN, which had a server seizure in 2015 that they didn’t want to disclose until like 2023… (gag order?)
I don’t torrent often, but I do occasionally…
If you dont torrent often you probably arent really needing port forwarding. I use mullvad and i torrent things all the time with zero issues.
How is mailbox? I just recently got proton set up with my custom domain and I kind of like it to be honest and their app is nice too.
What’s wrong with proton?
The owner of Proton is publicly a Trump supporter. Never trust a company that publicly supports Trump (e.g. Proton, StickerMule, etc.)
Honest question, do you think Gail Slater was a good or bad choice?
I have no idea who is she.
She has a track record of going after big tech, which can be a bit surprising as she is a republican. People were surprised that Trump chose her. That’s what the whole origin of “Proton CEO is pro-Trump” is about. Trump chose someone who isn’t a friend of big tech, and the Proton CEO posted that it was a good choice. This article explains the whole thing step by step: https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-trump-a-deeper-analysis-and-surprising-findings-aed4fee4305e
I like it
Why could this not just be a webpage with links instead of an image or PDF
Because I like infographics. :) I’ll be putting it on my website.
