cross-posted from: https://mastodon.uno/users/shiva/statuses/115037328638061283
NON voglio più essere tracciato.
NON voglio più essere tracciato.
@informatica
@GrapheneOS
@informapirata
This list is… fine, but unfortunately missing a number of good FOSS alternatives. Still, it’s good info for most of these categories.
Having said that, it’s eternally frustrating that infographics like these so often don’t recommend actual alternatives for YouTube specifically. It’s always just “keep using YouTube, but with these apps instead” which, that’s “fine”, but not exactly degoogling. It’s not even really a step towards degoogling, because you’re still tied to watching content from Google, so when that frontend stops functioning, you’re highly tempted to go back to using Google’s YouTube apps.
Also Aurora store. It’s just a front-end to play store. One should also ditch all chromium based browsers for couple of reasons
- Chromium is fully controlled by google
- It enforces mono-culture in web browsers (it’s the internet explorer of $currentYear).
It gets people out the door. They can refine later.
I feel like they did that with Youtube because there really aren’t any relevant alternatives. I mean there are alternatives but they’re really pretty small and niche so far.
You’re right, but also those alternatives will remain small and niche for longer the more people are not being directed to them as real alternatives.
There are creators slowly migrating their content to Peertube, for example. It would be nice for lists like this to be recommending that alternative more so those creators see interest rising there.
GrayJay is pretty good option, it does have YT but also has plug-ins for other services. So it could be good for getting results if searching for something that will show up in YT that the creator also uploaded to other sites, while still having the option to watch if not. Also has built-in support for SponsorBlock and DeArrow for the things that are only on YT (and can opt to sign into or stay signed out of YT account). PeerTube is still a mess though. Not able (or at least I don’t know how) to pick your instance to sign into and doesn’t seem to allow for adding to the pool of peers to help upload while watching. But I don’t think even the phone apps that specifically are for PT do that/have the option. Would be nice to be able to do that if on WiFi at least.
Impressive contribution. Listing all that’s wrong while offering zero alternatives.
You want me to provide an infographic of my own in order to make a minor critique of this one? That seems like a silly expectation to have to begin with, but also, you’re commenting in a community that has many many threads with actual Google alternatives discussed.
Recommending Brave or any other Chromium browser as an alternative for Chrome is a big no no for me.
Also, don’t use Organic Maps, use CoMaps
What’s the issue with OrganicMaps?
Most of the community contributors forked it as CoMaps recently. You can read why they started this project here.
I was not aware of this shit. Sneaky little fucks. I’ve been using OSMAnd~ for over 3 years now. Is this being affected as well? I did install comaps a few days ago to test it (I’m liking it so far). Any suggestions?
No, osmand is not affected, it is not related with organic in anyway.
Damn, so one of the founders still has closed source code running on Organic Maps. Unbelievable.
I’ll be switching immediately. Thanks for sharing.
The TL;DR is that while organic maps is open source the people maintaining it are running it as a for profit company.
Comaps is a fork that insists on being a nonprofit
Couple of additions:
- translate -> deepL (AI based with a free tier (no account required)), or for websites FireFox has a builtin offline translation tool
- drive -> Filen (Zero knowledge, E2EE)
- search -> Kagi (paid), or one of the listed
Also check the Fossify apps.
How can you forget DeepL at such a list? It’s Germany-based and actually provides better translations than Google Translate
DeepL is fantastic. Not only are the translations better, I find the UI better also.
I think the main downside for me is the lack of Asian languages other than basic Chinese (text-only, no voice). And then, no
Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai, Tagalog… And a smaller feature I also feel it misses is offline translations.I thought they had Japanese, just don’t understand romaji input
You are right…They DO have Japanese. You don’t need to be able to type it, as long as you can have a picture of it, just like Chinese. Pity about some of the other Asian languages. But seeing Indonesian in the list gives me hope for the rest. I’d love to see them having offline packages too.
Huh? I translate Japanese with DeepL all the time (sometimes I need assistance on my Textbook work 😅) and the individual words will be voiced at least (not the whole sentence though). They definitely have good Japanese translation.
The main reason why people use google maps is the fact it has reviews included.
Other navigation apps don’t offer this convenient feature.
Mapy.com does!
I personally recommend kagi instead of Google search. I’ve tried most of the ones in this list and kagi gives the best results, and consistently too.
Same, I know people are skeptical about paying for search, but you pay one way or the other for all searches. Being able to tweak my own page to rank to hide sites that are trash is pretty nice.
My problem with that is that my payment method is tied to one account that all of my searches go through, making it less anonymous. Even if they don’t save the payment method, they know that all queries are coming from one account, which can potentially be used to track someone.
Kagi also supports bangs, custom bangs, quick bangs, and fine style control.
kagi translate is also the best translation service ive used so far. better than google translate, even
Oh I haven’t actually tried that part of it, thanks for the tip.
How is it that all these lists are always kinda bad? They always miss some obvious good alternatives or have ones that shouldn’t be there. I’ve seen so many posted and not a single one has been without issues. And these are not subjective things I’m referencing, I’d have no issue with that, they just always seem to be made by someone who has very shallow and uninformed knowledge about the alternatives. My main issue here is Kagi missing from search, and Proton and Brave being part of any of the recommendations.
Whats the issue with proton?
CEO had a weird remark about a usa republican politician, people didn’t like to find out that some of their devs use AI coding assistants and then they attempted (and failed spectacularly) to remove its traces from their github repositories, and many don’t like that they launched a free LLM service.
I don’t know if I agree with the first one. I don’t know what to make of it, there is contradictory information about it on the internet, but I certainly keep that in mind.
I don’t care that much about the copilot configs in the repo, because I think it can be used kind of responsibility (relatively to the environment, not, though), but it’s extremely suspicious how they handled it.
the third is something I don’t agree with completely either. are we also hating duckduckgo for having duck.ai , or is it only proton? people say marketing it as encrypted is a scam. sure the queries cannot be end to end encrypted, but the storage of former chats can. did they market it as an E2EE service, without specifying which part is like that?
Didn’t think I’d see a degoogling list without DeepL, for translations. That’s definitely a choice.
Great recommendations, for YouTube I recommend taking a look at peertube and also, while this is not really a YouTube alternative, take a look at fmhy.net they have many links for tv shows, anime, movies, books, educational videos, documentaries, etc… Great tool :3
Brave browser is chromium based, don’t know about their translator though. Deepl is by far the better option.
Most browsers are chromium, like Vivaldi (the one I use and love).
I can highly recommend Proton password manager and 2fa app, which are not listed here. When you pay for their service, you have mail, drive, vpn, password manager, 2fa and it works great. Extra encryption, extra privacy.
Does Proton Password Manager still need you to log in with your Proton Mail Account? Because that was an instant nope for me.
Yes, but you can set an additional password for it
deleted by creator
They missed to mention Jitsi Meet, posteo.de, Nextcloud, Piped, and XMPP (for an example Snikket). But other than that, really good list! 😃
And yes, you can use others servers for Nextcloud, Piped, and XMPP/Snikket. No need for self-hosting your own.
I’ll be very happy when a google wallet alternative is made (don’t think it’s really possible right now!?).
Isn’t Aurora just a frontend to google play store? Just use F-droid
They’re different things, Aurora is a privacy respecting alternative to the play store app. F-Droid is it’s own thing but it’s library does have some overlap.
Best practice is to get both, and check F-Droir first.
Mozilla translate is offline on your device: about:translations#src=detect
Instead of google drive you could use cryptpad
I like droidify more then the fdroid client
CalyxOS is no more
