I’ve been a gmail user since it first came out, and I used to be a fan of google, but now I find myself more and more concerned with their data gathering practices. I’ve decided to move all of my personal services off of google onto open source self hosted alternatives. This page will act as a checklist for each of the services I’m able to get off of. Each of the links below will talk about what I’m using now and how I set it up.
Google Services To Replace #
Search #
This one was the easiest of the bunch. Instead of using google.com as a search engine, I now use duckduckgo.com. I’ve made duckduckgo.com my default search engine for everything. There’s even a command line tool that lets you search from the cli: ddgr
Browser #
Instead of using chrome, I’m now exclusively using Firefox.
Email #
Email was complicated since there are so many moving parts. Instead of gmail, I’m now using a combination of OpenBSD’s smtpd, the dovecot imap server, and OpenBSD’s spamd hosted on a Vultr VPS running OpenBSD. To read and send mail I’m now using aerc as well as Thunderbird as my local clients. I don’t do webmail anymore.
Calendar #
I switched from kcaldav to radicale on the server as it supports both calendars and contacts out of the box.
For my calendar, I’m now using simple calendar synching to a self hosted instance of radicale.
For desktop calendar/contacts, I’m currently using Thundebird as it syncs with radicale.
Photos #
I’ve recently found Photo Prism which seems to check all the boxes I care about (self hosted, open source, can share albums with others). Some of the features are paywalled, like allowing multiple users, but I don’t see myself giving anyone else access to the admin, I’ll just be sharing albums with them via the web. Trying it out now, but so far so good. A friend also suggested I check out IMMICH so I’ll play with that as well. I recently brought my NAS back to life so at the moment I’m busy importing all my photos going back to the year 2000, when I first got into digital photography.
After playing around with both Photo Prism, and Immich, I decided to go with Immich. It’s working really well and also has a phone app that syncs your new photos to your server automatically.
Contacts #
Radicale on the server and simple contacts/thunderbird for the clients.
Maps #
While I’ve used openstreetmap it’s not very effective where I live. I’ve been contributing to it when I can, but it can’t yet replace google maps for me.
I recently found Magic Earth which, while not open source, doesn’t track you.
I think I need to just rip off the bandaid and switch to anything other than google maps, this has so far proven to be the hardest one to switch away from.
Android #
I know there are some open source forks of Android out there and I’ve tried CyanogenMod previously (which I guess is now called LineageOS), but I think ideally I’d like something like the PinePhone to fully opt out of the Android ecosystem.
I did buy a PinePhone and while it’s a nice linux computer, as a phone it leaves some things to be desired. If I ever get around to reviewing it, I will do so here
I’ve been checking out the Fairphone
Authenticator #
Instead of Google Authenticator I’m using andOTP.
Play Store #
Instead of the play store, I’m using F-Droid a catalog of open source software for Android.
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