Comment by TranquilMarmot

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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

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?

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.