WTF! No sign up or anything! Just a fucking email telling me I’m using it?
Fuck you Google!
I remember distinctly looking for a picture for a shit post, then I magically subscribed to having my data at their disposal? What the ever living fuck. Google will regret this move.


The only real answer is breaking away from Google as much as possible, and that’s a hard ask, especially without getting into selfhosting.
Search: DDG is okay but offers its own AI shit and gives a pass to Microsoft trackers. Kagi seems great but it’s a paid service and an expensive one at that. The best option IMO is SearXNG, but unless you host it yourself, and while there are a good handful of big public instances, you’re putting your trust in whoever’s hosting the service at the other end, plus it’s just an aggregator of other search engine results. I do feel a selfhosted SearXNG instance is the best option though for sure.
Drive: ProtonDrive seems fine but I don’t trust Proton as a company after their CEO expressed support for a fascist. Once again selfhosting wins out, with Opencloud or Nextcloud or really any service along those lines.
Gmail: Proton again is a good option, but also again I don’t really have faith in them. I’ve been using Tuta which works fine, the inbox is very slow admittedly but otherwise no complaints.
Youtube: Incredibly difficult one to move away from, so something like Invidious or NewPipe is the way to go to cut out their bullshit. Alternatives are slowly cropping up but not remotely anywhere close to the size and scale of youtube.
Photos: I honestly can’t think of a non-selfhosted alternative here. Immich and Ente are the closest things by a mile.
Maps: Personally I like CoMaps for general use and MagicEarth for navigation. The latter isn’t FOSS but they seem solid enough and have earned plenty of recommendations from those trying to leave google behind entirely.
Translate:
DeepL is alright I guess? It’s worked fine for me but I admittedly don’t know much about the company or product, just seems to be a common recommendation. It’s not nearly as accurate unfortunately.DeepL is also an LLM, isn’t it?
I don’t believe so but I could be wrong. Last I checked it’s been around for years, long before the whole genAI shitshow took off. Might be thinking of Deepseek, which despite the similar name I don’t think are related. Though again I haven’t really done much research on this one, just seems to be a common recommendation when trying to move away from google products as a whole.
https://www.deepl.com/en/blog/next-gen-language-model
Oh motherfucker we can’t have anything
I found ente to be a bit of a pain self-hosted. Setting the storage amount to pretend to be paid was weird, and the iOS app crashed a ton. Switched to Immich and found that to be a lot more stable; though syncing from iCloud from iOS was again a pain, I was able to use icloudpd to import photos directly to the storage location on my server. It’s not encrypted like ente is, so that’s something I need to solve locally.
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
Got immich and navidrome. Working on an docker mailserver hybrid thing. Next jellyfin and something for network drive.