this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2025
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Asklemmy

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Right now a lot of us are trying to divest and diversify from having our entire lives on Google both because of the way Google spends its money and the long-standing privacy concerns seeming a bit more scary now.

What services have you switched to and what has your experience been? What do you like, what don't you like, would you recommend them?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 23 hours ago (4 children)

These are what I use:

Browsers: Fennec, LibreWolf

Email Clients: K-9, Fair Email, Proton Mail, Thunderbird

Pictures: Fossify Camera, Fossify Gallery

File Sharing: Proton Drive

YouTube: Tubular

SMS Messaging: Textra (It's not FOSS, but unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a FOSS app in existence that shows the actual name of the person who's sent the message in group chats. They just show an icon, which isn't enough for me to keep track)

App store: Droid-ify (F-Droid), Aurora Store

Password Manager: Bitwarden

eBook Reader: Librera FD

Books: Bookwyrm

Translation: LibreTranslator

Calendar: Proton Calendar

What I can't find good alternatives for:

YouTube itself - enough said

Phone screen translation - I still use Google Assistant, and I'm not aware of anything else that grabs and translates all text on my phone screen

Maps - Rant time. This one is so annoying because there are FOSS navigation apps based on OpenStreetMap that are excellent in every way except one that makes them unusable for me: Using POV navigation instead of observing the convention of up = north. I did find one that lets you maintain a normal map view during navigation, but it doesn't keep your position centered automatically, which makes it impossible to use while driving. I have no idea who all you deranged people are who actually like the POV navigation, but there are definitely a lot of you because I can't find a replacement for Google Maps. I even tried Mapquest because at least it's not Google, but when I tried using it to navigate the first time, it somehow autocorrected "St" to "Ave" and I ended up lost lol. This maps situation really grinds my gears. I do still try to contribute as much as I can to OSM though because it's an important project, and hopefully someday an uninsane developer will make a proper alternative to Google Maps.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I have no idea who all you deranged people are who actually like the POV navigation

I use both POV and up=north depending on my use case. For some routes where I don't care about the details of the route I find it useful to have the POV view with what I need now zoomed in and correctly oriented and what I'll need soon still visible and smaller but still distinguishable.

The problem with up=north is that when you've zoomed right in to see the detail, all the wider view stuff is missing, especially when out of built-up zones. It'd be better if the detail level would be replaced/augmented with a detail density setting, so that when you're out in the sticks with only you, a small single track road with grass down the middle and one sheep visible all the way up to the horizon in any direction that you don't have to zoom right in to the individual blades of grass before you see the road you're on.

Other times I do care about the route, and in those cases I'll use up=north and manual zoom as needed. I still get caught out though when travelling south and the arrow pointing left means I need to turn right.

When I first saw POV I thought it was a stupid gimmick. But then I tried it out and really liked it, but not always.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

I always like seeing the details, and I can't imaging looking at a map and up not being north. It would be like reading a book turned sideways -- hypothetically I could do it, but it would require far more brainpower to interpret than it's worth. I do like my location kept as the centerpoint though. That's really nice, but apparently hard to implement. The "re-center" feature on Google Maps is my friend.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Would you mind hitting us with a direct link to tubular? This is one of the biggest hindrances to getting completely off google

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago (2 children)
[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

I can't get it to work. It works for you?

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago

Thanks โ™ฅ๏ธ

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

FreeTube is a good replacement for YouTube on PC and NewPipe is good on Android phones.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 22 hours ago

Yeah Tubular is basically NewPipe with Sponsorblock. I'll give Freetube a try.

What I mean though is ... it's still YouTube, y'know?

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 22 hours ago

Oh, and I go back and forth between Sear XNG and Startpage for search engine. I know Startpage is Bad, but there's no search engine in existence that really makes me happy.