I’ve been a gmail user since it first came out, and I used to be a fan of google, but now I find myself more and more concerned with their data gathering practices. I’ve decided to move all of my personal services off of google onto open source self hosted alternatives. This page will act as a checklist for each of the services I’m able to get off of. Each of the links below will talk about what I’m using now and how I set it up.

Google Services To Replace⌗

This one was the easiest of the bunch. Instead of using google.com as a search engine, I now use duckduckgo.com. I’ve made duckduckgo.com my default search engine for everything. There’s even a command line tool that lets you search from the cli: https://github.com/jarun/ddgr

Browser⌗

Instead of using chrome, I’m now exclusively using Firefox.

Email⌗

Email was complicated since there are so many moving parts. Instead of gmail, I’m now using a combination of OpenBSD’s smtpd, the dovecot imap server, and OpenBSD’s spamd hosted on a Vultr VPS running OpenBSD. To read and send mail I’m now using aerc as well as Thunderbird as my local clients. I don’t do webmail anymore.

Calendar⌗

For my calendar, I’m now using simple calendar synching to a self hosted instance of kcaldav. I pretty much only use my calendar on my phone so I don’t currently have a web version.

Photos⌗

No good solution for photos yet.

Contacts⌗

Haven’t tried to figure out contact syncing yet.

Maps⌗

While I’ve used openstreetmap it’s not very effective where I live. I’ve been contributing to it when I can, but it can’t yet replace google maps for me.

I recently found Magic Earth which, while not open source, doesn’t track you.

Android⌗

I know there are some open source forks of Android out there and I’ve tried CyanogenMod previously (which I guess is now called LineageOS), but I think ideally I’d like something like the PinePhone to fully opt out of the Android ecosystem.

Authenticator⌗

Instead of Google Authenticator I’m using andOTP.

Play Store⌗

Instead of the play store, I’m using F-Droid a catalog of open source software for Android.