Help Me Bust Out of the Google/Amazon Garden

February 24, 2018 9:29 PM

Need your suggestions for cloud storage, file transfer, photo backup, online purchases, email, browsing, et cetera, et cetera, as low friction as possible.

It’ll be a treat to go back to Firefox and a local email client (Eudora was awesome, wasn’t it!). Help a Metafilterer get back to basics.

posted by notyou to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

I think the lowest friction option (if you want it to be under your control) is if you have some sort of NAS/home server that can easily install a package like NextCloud. OwnCloud is another one.

This would cover most of the common cloud services. If you do not have some sort of NAS, or (like me) you have crappy internet service at home, you could do it on a virtual server (ie I use DigitalOcean). That is definitely not low friction, you would need a fairly advanced knowledge of Linux/networking to pull this off. The upside is you can run any service or webapp anything yourself that you can think. If that sort of thing floats your boat, check out r/selfhosted.
posted by bradbane at 9:54 PM on February 24, 2018 [1 favorite]

Yep nextcloud is good, it can also do automatic file backup from your phone. I find it much more useable than Google's equivalent. Out of the box it is not a backup solution, it's a file sync/cloud solution, don't get the two muddled up.

Fastmail is being ok for me for email and they do standard IMAP access so you can use whatever client you want.
posted by deadwax at 10:23 PM on February 24, 2018

If you liked Eudora (I did, too!) you'll probably like Thunderbird just fine.
If you like Google for searches, you should try Startpage.com which uses the Google engine but is anonymized.
If you like Chrome as a browser, you'll like Chromium or Iridium (the former is mostly Googlefree, the latter completely so). But you could also try Vivaldi or Slimjet.

It would be helpful to know what platform (OS) you are on.
posted by Too-Ticky at 4:01 AM on February 25, 2018 [1 favorite]

Also it might help to know what your reasons are for wanting to avoid Google and Amazon; solutions may vary depending on what exactly you want to avoid.
posted by Too-Ticky at 4:06 AM on February 25, 2018

I've sort of spread it around.

Email: IMAP sever that comes with my web hosting account
Photos storage: Amazon Prime Photos
Music Cloud storage - Google Music
Cloud sync / backup - Spider Oak - includes photos and music so I can quit Amazon or Google whenever I want
RSS - self hosted in paid for web hosting account
Blog - paid web hosting account
Search - Duck Duck Go
posted by COD at 6:04 AM on February 25, 2018 [1 favorite]

What I use:
cloud storage -> dropbox
file transfer -> dropbox
online purchases -> ebay, Home Depot, B&H, Powell's Books, etc
browsing -> firefox
posted by splitpeasoup at 12:09 PM on February 25, 2018 [1 favorite]