In my neck of the woods OpenStreetMap is way more accurate than Google Maps. Map is less noisy visually, and if there are any errors in the map, I can fix them myself and see results immediately.

(From that link, about adding new subscriptions)

>The only real trick is that most YouTube channels use a vanity URL and it’s more complicated to get the channel ID in those instances.

Go to the channel's videos page ( https://youtube.com/.../videos ) -> right-click -> View page source -> search for "rssUrl" . It'll look like https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC...

Bonus: Replace the "?channel_id=UC..." with "?playlist_id=UULF..." to get a feed without shorts and livestreams.

I love Proton but the idea of subscribing and committing to renew annually is a turn off. There's probably be a huge market behind the psychology of this.

They should offer a lifetime option for the core service and monetize the add-ons and new features.

> What are the tradeoffs?

As others point out, my main worry is about banking and NFC. I use NFC payments on my phone a lot, especially for the bus. Getting an Android Smartwatch just for that kind of defeats de-Googling haha.

I will probably try out Graphene at some point but that seems like a multi-day project to get it set up, find the tradeoffs, determine if they're worth it, and then potentially switch back to Android.

I also worry about the future of Graphene with AOSP going more closed/private: https://www.androidauthority.com/google-android-development-...

> OSMAnd has a lot of feature but the UX is harder

OSMAnd was the one I tried and it bordered on unusable. I'll try out CoMaps, somebody else suggested Mapy.

I use https://brouter.de/brouter-web on my laptop. Someone told me that you can use brouter as the nav engine for Osmand and thus greatly improve speed and accuracy for navigation, but I have not yet tried this.

And I recently installed GMaps WV from Fdroid as a wrapper for Google Maps. It gives current traffic information but I don't really know if it is even close to gmaps.

Can you use GrapheneOS with your bank app? With a digital wallet for NFC cards? With Uber or Lyft? (Asking seriously, not rhetorically.)

Someone showed me OSMAnd recently while we were hiking. I installed it as soon as I got home. Great for hiking.

Then last week I used it for navigation (on a phone with no SIM card).

Absolutely. Terrible.

Worst navigation app I've seen. Told me to make a turn at an intersection that did not allow turns. Then at another intersection, it told me to "Turn left", but the display clearly showed it going straight. I'm guessing that the straight road probably is angled 1 degree or something at the intersection and the app was viewing that as a turn.

I second mapy. I've replaced Google maps with this one ~5 years ago and never looked back. You can download specific maps for a country and within that specific federal states to reduce space consumed. I use it mostly for biking and hiking - you can plan tours with scaling duration/kilometers which is nice for a region you are unfamiliar with. Like parent wrote, offline access, routing, RT traffic. Can recommend.

Mapy looks nice!

> But there's no substitute for GMap's POI database.

I was surprised to see that Kagi uses Apple's POIs for searching maps. It seems to be pretty decent, and Apple is at least a little more privacy-friendly. Lately I've been using Kagi to search for businesses then opening the directions in Google Maps.

I tried using OSM directions, but the walking time calculations are always really far off from what Google Maps says. I don't drive anymore, only walk and public transit, so I can't really speak to how well OSM's driving directions are.

For a mobile and offline-friendly solution, organicmaps.app is brilliant!

Does Immich read real file names of photos from iOS Photos metadata? I don't even know whether Apple preserves it and exposes to other apps?

I used Ente and I learned all the files I had "added/uploaded" to iCloud photos had lost their real names (that I had painstakingly given them over the years/decades) when ente exported to those photos back on my laptop via their desktop app and were these long random uuid strings kinda names. That was my yikes moment and I was glad I had still kept my photos outside of iCloud and Ente. And it is not even Ente's fault. Apple does this skullbuggery.

Are there PAYG hosted instanes of Immich?

Why did you switch to LineageOS and not Graphene with your pixel 7?

Owned by Haliburton

https://ir.halliburton.com/news-releases/news-release-detail...

Was about to mention magic earth, but of course someone else has recommended it already. Was talking with a coworker about degoogling and they brought up this. Surprisingly works good enough where I live.

It's quite possible to use Android without a Google account.

GrapheneOS lets you use Play Store apps

Set up your Hetzner boxes in a European location so that they are in the same network zone. Activate automatic snapshots and Hetzner does 7 snapshots (a full image of your box) a day. The snapshot is never saved at the same location as the server running your box, but at one of the other locations in the same network zone.

> Do you simply trust hetzner to not lose the data on your 1TB storage box?

I don't! I haven't set it up yet, but my plan is to set up a daily cron job to use rsync to copy the photos down to a physical hard drive I have in my desktop computer. This desktop isn't on 24/7 so I would need to remember to turn it on to sync.

It would take something real catastrophic for actual data loss; Hetzner would have to somehow lose my storage box data & all its backups (or I lose access to my Hetzner account), my local cron job would have to fail or the hard drive would die, and I would have to lose my phone which has the last few years of photos on it.

To be fair if both google and dropbox can't take care of 1TB of data, who can?

My solution against photo anxiety is to actually look at them and decide to physically print the best ones every year. More likely to be used as gifts or just fun to look through them in a photo album, nobody is going to sit next to you on a phone or computer but bring out an old photo album and everyone is on it.

It is still viable to self-host everything from photos to mail yourself and sync to cloud/storage services as disaster recovery. It helps if you have an infrastructure background but anyone can set this up. Never trust just one service; no company is too big to fail and durability is always best effort, even if that effort is very good. Mail is the most annoying service to self-host, not because it's technically difficult but because deliverability is a long-term reputation function that easily deteriorates from misconfiguration or neglect. Nevertheless I've been my own MX and storage provider since the early '90s and it's too late to change my ways now, you just have to keep up with the gold standard as it varies.

The biggest hazard, especially if the whole family uses your stuff, is key-person risk, since infrastructure requires maintenance. The second biggest is being out of your depth in securing it.

My only regret in all my years of self-hosting was that time I returned a portable /24 to APNIC. Still stings even if it was the right thing to do, civically speaking.

I retain gmail & hotmail accounts for deliverability checks and as signup swamps.

Back it up to S3 glacier, or to Backblaze. The cost of it is pretty low, much lower than a VPS / bare metal box + 1 TB cost for the photo app hosting.

There is CoMaps on iOS that is open source and is based on OpenStreetMap. Highly recommended.

I thought about this, but I don't really trust maintaining spinning rust myself for something as "precious" as 15+ years of photos. I do have a desktop computer but it's running Windows 11 and I don't have it on 24/7. Live in a small apartment and definitely do NOT have the space anywhere for a dedicated server.

I like the idea of having everything hosted somewhere that's guaranteed to be up-and-running 24/7 using Debian with automatic full backups turned on. If I go on vacation somewhere and something goes wrong, I can easily SSH into it. If it was on my desktop and I was away and there was a power outage or something, I'd be out of luck.

It *is* a little slow but it's honestly fast enough. I was going to do periodic backups of the storage box to a local hard drive just in case, though.

It can definitely be hard or impossible to cut it out of work situations.

At work we use GSuite, so even though I was able to get out of all of it personally I still interact with Google products every day. I'm okay with that since it's not my data that's being stored - it's the data of the company I work for.

Note that they mention using a custom domain. I strongly encourage you to do this (sounds like you don't), because then you don't depend on the mail provider. After Gmail, I started using my own domain and changed provider every year (Proton, Fastmail, and I landed on Migadu).

The key is that if you have your domain, you can swap the provider and nobody has to know about it.

1) "De-googling" doesn't need to be a binary, all-in or all-out situation. Any reduction in reliance of Google (or any single point of failure) is good. Diversifying the big stuff (mail, storage, etc.) is a great start. About last on the list is worrying about the occasional allowance for gstatic.com or whatever.

2) While I occasionally need to allow some scripts from google, it's absolutely nowhere near 1/3rd of sites.

I've de-Googled myself and this idea does not match my reality.

I've largely de-Googled myself, but not my family. The only Gmail I have is from a few old accounts that hardly ever email me anymore; I've been on Apple's email, calendar, photos, etc. for years, and use Kagi for search. Nor do I feel any pull back toward Google. The biggest involvement I have is for the correspondents I have who are still using Gmail; every time I email them, my stuff ends up in Google's system.

It is almost always blocking first party JavaScript and XHRs that causes breakages. I have rarely had to enable Google anything in uMatrix to get a site to work (more often it is Cloudflare), and it is only if the site insists on reCAPTCHA.

Having used both Google and Apple for notes, calendar, docs, cloud back up (general files) and photos I have come to believe Google has the better tech but Apple has the better product. It fascinates me how Google just can’t design a simple and intuitive UI for its products, which are by all means technically superior.

Yes, one of the reasons for "de-Googling" was to make it easier to switch to different devices if I want/need to. After moving everything out of Gmail/Google Drive/Calendar/Photos I can much easier switch to iOS. My current phone has many years of life in it, though, so I'm okay with sticking with it.

I'm a happy icloud photos user. Other sync is not so good, but icloud photos works fine.

iCloud stuff is generally fine, except for iCloud Drive which is atrocious.

As I said, I was uncomfortable having my entire digital life "owned" by Google.

If you're unfamiliar with the concept of "monoculture" in agriculture:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoculture

> Monocultures increase ease and efficiency in planting, managing, and harvesting crops short-term, often with the help of machinery. However, monocultures are more susceptible to diseases or pest outbreaks long-term due to localized reductions in biodiversity and nutrient depletion

This was how I felt - it was easy and efficient to "just use Google" but long term it felt a bit like "nutrient depletion". A lot of the services I moved onto are better than Google in a lot of ways and have different ideas about how things should work. Sticking with Google, you will only get the Google way of doing things and services you may rely on can be killed off on a whim by some C-suite executive (https://killedbygoogle.com/)

There are also a lot of political reasons behind why I'm doing this but I don't want to get into that too much here on HN. Tech oligarchy is ruling the United States and I don't want to be complicit in that. I was also tired of being a serf of "technofeudalism" (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/751443/technofeudal...) and am seeking ways to avoid that.

Not the author, but it's nice to support alternatives.

The trick is in never ever touching the username@paid-main-provider.tld to give out to anyone. It's just for logging in.

My mailbox.org username is literally three random short Engish dict words concatnated by underscores (e.g jet_sit_gill@mailbox.org) just to ensure I'd never share that email with anyone. I only use my domain's email addresses. This way there's ZERO lock, zero fear of them giving my email to someone else and staying with the domain provider for a day longer than I have to.

For email addresses on others' domains here

- icloud.com came with the devices (I honestly have not thought about what happens to these if I have zero Apple device at one point in future :D)

- tutanota(barely ever used; just to support them I paid until they removed the 12/year plan)

- protonmail, and sdf.org (ARPA)

All of these at least let me hold on to the email address even with little resources when I stop paying or have an unpaid a/c. So little risk of email goign to someone else. And I never use these for anything important anyway.

For temp emails - duck.com, HideMyEmail (stopped using this one for new accounts though).

This does not appear correct. I lost my original account in 2013 and the handle is extremely unique, and I just tried to reregister it, and it won't allow it. ("Sorry, [redacted]@fastmail.fm has already been taken.")

Are you sure you didn't confuse domains? My original handle is on fastmail.fm, but it will let me register that on fastmail.com.

I really wish all mail providers made it easy and seamless to bring your own domain (or register and manage one in the background for you, without you having to care for the details). Obviously giving a service-tied email domain to users is a great lock-in strategy. But it's worrying that so many people have a big part of their online identity tied to Google.

(You can even sign up for a Google Account without GMail, using a third-party domain. And this is distinct from Google Workspace, or whatever they're calling it today. You get a normal, regular, personal Google Account, just without GMail and using your own non-gmail.com address.)

This would be easily solved for customers who care about it by allowing you to pay a one-off fee to reserve the name for ~100 years.

Or they could just absorb that.

Any idea why it works that way? Have they offered an explanation?

I'm a Fastmail customer but I've never noticed this because I use my own domain.

I don't think that's true. Some years ago I did a free trial with them (did not pay anything). More recently I decided to actually sign up (for a paid account) and the email address I used for the free trial years ago was not available. I eventually got that username only after contacting support and giving them the date on which I started that free trial, to prove it was me.

When you move to a new house the old address becomes available for mail eventually.

With Fastmail, creating an email alias is free, and quick -- I have dozens myself. There's good reason FM would not want these to be tied up forever.

Could the above report have lost the distinction between original, paid-for Fastmail address, and user-created free aliases to it?

I use Fastmail with my own domain. I am not sure of the logic that says paying $60/year for email is fine, but $8/year for a domain is a bridge too far.

Do that, it's a non-issue, though I do agree with you that it shouldn't be a thing (or at least have like a multiple year embargo on the address).

Domain names work the same way -- once you stop paying for it, someone else can buy and use it.

Do you have the same problem with domain names? If so, how would you propose to fix it?

Definitely not acceptable, sounds like not good thinking. Consumer protections might exist in the US for this.

It is easier to change MX records for your personal domain.

At one point in the late 90s the U.S. Post Office was going to host email. Sadly, it didn’t happen.

How's that different from any other provider?

That is 100% unacceptable.

not if you use your own domain they don't.

So does mailbox do from OP. Just after some time, depending on which package you had. Eg after your light package expired, the address is free for reregistration after 90 days.

I find it "meh" as well.

I don’t see masked email feature in Migadu, is there one? Useful for burner services

> can't migrate stars/icons for emails.

(1) Create s label for starred emails, eg "Star-struck". A Unicode star would do if you like it literal.

(2) In gmail, search for "is:starred", mark all on the page, then "mark all matching emails".

(3) Drop the "Star-struck" tag on them. Now you can migrate it as a normal tag.

How dod you that? I am paying them thousands per year and support is neither good nor fast.

And my requests are usually well written as we deal with emails a lot and understand how it works (if you pardon my slight bragging)

In particular, encrypted email provides privacy but not anonymity. You need some sort of onion routing system for that. Back in the day people would set up such routing systems for email.

It turns out that most people don't really need anonymity. That is why most systems these days don't bother the user with all the associated hassle. Briar and Session come to mind as contemporary examples of such things.

Unfortunately this is common in many smtp servers and is configuration dependent: After you authenticate as usera@example.com you can send emails as userb@example.com.

The article does call out plain text email without formatting or attachments. Plain text typically refers to visual formatting, while clear text refers to lack of encryption.

the web client can send plain text, it's only the mobile client that doesn't have an option to do so

You mean e2e? on-disk encryption (ie. "encryption at rest") is basically used by everyone, including gmail and outlook.

Mailbox doesn’t support it, but on mailbox you can use your IMAP app with Proton not.

And on mailbox you can easily send and receive PGP encrypted mail on mailbox.org. They provide a page for key import, allowing you to send encrypted emails like regular mail when needed.

It’s your choice, if you always want to use proton mail app everywhere you can use proton.

What bothered me about Gmail was that it was central to my life and if something were to happen and they locked my account they have zero support.

With that out of the way I feel perfectly happy with FM — no need to go further down the paranoia hole.

Backup your data. Email is data. It is easy enough to do and frees you from many problems. You restore from backup and go on with life.

Self-hosting seems a bit extreme. The first step is actually to have your own custom domain, so that you can change provider easily. Granted you still depend on a provider, but you are not locked in.

> self-hosting on your own metal, where you're now just dependent on your ISP

Your ISP, the hardware not failing, needing to do routine maintenance and (expensive!) upgrades, having room in your house, having consistent power to your servers, possible theft, natural disasters causing you to lose your home, etc.

There's a reason I use a VPS for hosting a lot of things haha. Mostly because I live in a small apartment and don't have room for a server rack.

It's more about diversifying at least that was my intention when I moved mail to a new provider.

Unfortunately, most big mail providers won’t accept email from your self-hosted mail server, even with DKIM, SPF, etc. So, diversifying is as good as it gets.

Which is why you should buy your own domain so you can easily move to another provider.

And backup your emails of course.

There's no reason to self-host your e-mail server. As long as you own your domain, you can simply point the DNS to a different provider when you want to switch.

Fastmail is australian.

Namecheap's "private email" service.