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.
Open source licensing, offline-only usability, and self-hostable are the only important criteria to me, and they are not listed here.
Yes, I’d say this is for beginners—say, my mom—who are heavily in the Google ecosystem and don’t know how to get out. Maybe I should change the focus away from privacy, since Google has many other issues besides privacy that made me leave.
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!
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 :)
Oh, very cool! Yes, do reach out if you decide to do it.
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.
Great list so far! I’d also like to recommend KSuite. They have email services and KDrive for storage.
I think I’m all set now,…but I will check this out and potentially add it to the website links 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 😔
Isn’t Grayjay a frontend for YouTube?
Aha! Yes, it is. Any suggestions for non-YouTube video platforms?
Maybe Peertube or Odyssey.
Thanks!
It is. Same as NewPipe but they are using different extraction methods I think.
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.
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?
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
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!
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.
Mapy Interesting! I can’t get it to give me directions from one (U.S. residence to another), but I’ll keep an eye on it.
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?
Yeah, rss isn’t for everyone.
The capitalization for OsmAnd should be corrected. Please?
Of course! Thanks!
I see Ground News recommended all the time but for some reason i cannot trust it, idk why
I mean it’s heavily advertised by YouTubers. And basically everything that sponsors YouTube videos is a scam.
Thank you!
