I am a phone scroller and social media reader and a YouTube watcher. My phone and by extension my Google account are my mobile office. I regret having to buy an Apple Mac Mini but I am not giving up Logic as my DAW. I got away from overpriced Samsung devices a few years ago and have a fairly bloat-free Motorola. Now I want to dump the Google ecosystem. I intend to download all of my pics and files from Drive and the Google cloud. I am not so tech savvy that I can install APKs or switch to Linux, and I’d like to watch video streamers that aren’t saturated in developer links (seriously, why do y’all do this?..just put one simple link to “Developer Info” or something and put all the other links there). I want to use and enjoy the net like any idiot would but without being The Product. I am Lemmy over Reddit (though you both ban me from subs with equal ferver); MeWe over Facebook (though MeWe is moving towards an unprivate model now); Mastodon over Xittstain. I have a ProtonMail account, but mainly for registrations…I have had a Gmail account since Earthlink took a nosedive.
What/who else is out there for me to frequent and replace all the corporatist models?in the past I tried Minds (all Nazis all the time!) and Ello (socmed for creative types, yet still looks like a shitty 1970’s mimeographed zine). I also spent a couple of years at one called MyBetzCo that started out okay but died because none of the members would make public posts for interacting with others.
What do you recommend for private/decentralizwd clouds, socmeds or media sites?
If you aren’t too tech savvy I would recommend against self hosted services. There are amazing solutions out there but they will cost a few bucks.
For cloud storage I use Hetzner’s https://www.your-storageshare.de. It’s a hosted Nextcloud with pretty much all the freedom you can get. Currently it costs about 5 Euros per month for 1TB of storage. You can even share it with your family and friends because you can create more users on your instance. While I self hosted Nextcloud and Syncthing in the past this is just way less work.
Your-storageshare replaced Dropbox/Google Drive, Google Calendar, Google Contacts and Google Photos for me. That’s a pretty huge chunk of the services I use passively all the time. With Nextcloud’s encryption enabled and GDPR regulations in place it is IMHO as save as you can get without self hosting.
For mails I am quite happy with https://mailbox.org - it starts at 1 Euro per month but I recommend the 3 Euros tier. It’s no Proton Mail but somehow to me it seems more trustworthy. They don’t overpromise on features but provide a solid secure service. Most of the time I send unencrypted mails (due to various reasons) but you could use SMIME with it. Since it provides IMAP you could even integrate it with your-storageshare using the Nextcloud Mail app.
Both services support your own domains so if you fancy it you could set up www.IHadTwoCows.com for cloud and mail. Hetzner has you covered for domains too. Not the cheapest but reliable.
For search I use https://startpage.com. It uses Google results but anonymized. I am very happy with it.
And that, kids, is the story of how I banned Google from my digital life. (okay, Maps is still there but all the alternatives where just not good enough with traffic jams in my city)
Yes I second all of this. If you dont want to self-host, Nextcloud hosted on some external server is the way forward. Nextcloud is incredibly versatile. It’s my music collection, photo collection, agenda, contacts, file sync, location tracker and much more.
I am kind of in the same boat as OP and I did come across Nextcloud. But how reliable is Nextcloud hosted by some other org/company/person? Aren’t we running away from a company hosting our data to another company hosting our data?
In a way yes, we are running from company to company. For myself I accepted a few compromises along the way because I don’t have the time and energy to do everything myself. So this is where I am at.
Hosting email yourself is a nightmare and is getting basically impossible more and more (see here). So I accepted my fate and looked for a solution that fits my needs.
For cloud storage I used to self host Nextcloud and / or Syncthing for years. While it was fun in the beginning I loathed it at the end. Even with good hardware and Docker and 25 years of experience there was always something that stopped to work after a while - especially with Nextcloud. For Syncthing (which I really like) there is no real client for iOS (wife’s phone). Also exposing anything to the internet can turn into a nightmare pretty quickly. But my work blocks my VPN… You see what I mean? There certainly are solutions for all that but I was tired of looking.
Hetzner is a large German hoster with a quite good reputation. They need to follow GDPR regulations and because they provide closely monitored solutions for my work I know they do as much as possible. The Nextcloud instance is super reliable ever since I started.
I use Nextcloud tools for encryption at rest which is enough for me. They even let you perform cli commands (a few from a web UI, other through support mail). Support is fast and well informed.
It is certainly not for everyone! But for my scenario it is the currently best compromise.
Thanks