Over the past few months, I embarked on a rewarding digital journey to move away from US big tech and towards more European [EU], open source [FOSS], privacy-oriented [P], and decentralized [D] alternatives.
I’m sharing my experience here in case it can be useful to others, as well as to gather any additional thoughts or suggestions:
- Desktop OS: Microsoft Windows 11 --> OpenSUSE Tumbleweed + KDE [EU][FOSS]
- Web browser: Google Chrome --> Brave --> Vivaldi --> Mozilla Firefox + Strict privacy settings, uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, Conset-O-Matic [FOSS][P]
- Email: Gmail --> Infomaniak Mail [EU][FOSS]
- Calendar: Google Calendar --> Infomaniak Calendar [EU][FOSS] + OneCalendar [EU]
- Files: Dropbox --> Infomaniak kDrive [EU][FOSS]
- Photos: Google Photos --> Infomaniak kDrive [EU][FOSS]
- Notes: Google Keep --> Notesnook [FOSS][P]
- Social Media:
- Facebook --> Nothing
- Twitter/X --> Mastodon (
mas.to) [EU][FOSS][D] - Reddit --> Lemmy (
lemm.ee) [EU][FOSS][D]
- AI Chatbot: OpenAI ChatGPT --> Mistral AI Le Chat [EU]
- Videos: Youtube --> Unwatched [EU][FOSS][P]
- Podcasts: Apple Podcasts --> Spotify --> Pocket Casts [FOSS]
- Translate: Google Translate --> DeepL [EU]
- Maps: Google Maps --> Organic Maps [EU][FOSS][P]
- Weather: Apple Weather --> YR [EU]
- Online payments: PayPal --> Revolut [EU]
- Password manager: LastPass --> Mozilla Firefox --> Bitwarden [FOSS][P]
- Online shopping: Amazon --> Cdiscount [EU]
- Travel booking:
Booking.com--> Direct booking
And here’s the list of things I couldn’t let go of:
- Mobile OS: iOS | I have a business iPhone which is also my personal phone
- Messaging: WhatsApp | The network effect is too big here: family, friends, local businesses, etc
- Streaming services: Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ | These come basically for free with my ISP and are too convenient for the moment (esp. w/ kids)
Is infomaniak really OSS, or are just the clients FOSS?
Good question, I haven’t investigated thoroughly, but the various clients are definitely open source.
mas.to is hosted on cloudflare which is a us tech giant. I would suggest you to move to some other small instances.
for podcasts ☞ https://f-droid.org/packages/de.danoeh.antennapod
I’m a big fan of antenna pod but it’s not available on ios.
Dont want to dunk a piece of gold in litres of shit do we?
Android only though (I’m on iOS)
AI Chatbot: OpenAI ChatGPT --> Mistral AI Le Chat [EU]
If you are willing to do all of this, then you should look into hosting your own LLM. Using any commercial offering is a bad idea, especially in context degoogling.
The simplest way is to not use one.
And that is REALLY simple because you don’t need one.
It’s a pretty big jump to go from ChatGPT/LeChat to hosting your own LLM locally, if you want results that are anywhere close to the commercial offerings. Both of them even have a free tier that would probably still be better than anything you could run locally without significant hardware investment. It’s definitely not difficult these days, but it’s very expensive to get close results unless you’ve already got the hardware.
