this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
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I wonder if this correlates with my recent desires to de-Google my life. I'm steadily growing less happy about daily using their services and them holding all my info.
I'm open to suggestions for cloud photo storage/management on par with Google Photos if anyone has some. I'm looking into FOSS but would rather pay for the service in the long run. These days I'm too busy to learn to be an effective server admin and keep up with the technology.
Proton, has email, cloud storage and VPN services.
I'll second Proton. It sucks to have to pay for services again to have something that matches the generous free shit that we got before... but seems those wild west days of the internet, unless you were grandfathered on or have to give up a lot of info in return... are now long gone.
If you're not paying for a service, then you're the product. I never understood the expectation that people should just provide you email and storage for free, because?
This saying is actually horseshit, though. The profit motive and infinite growth model of capitalism guarantees that even if you are paying for a product, your data and attention — everything that can be — will be monetized eventually.
The saying should be "if the service isn't open-source and E2E encrypted, you're the product"
Nah I'd disagree. Infinite growth motive doesn't necessarily apply to private companies. To suggest there's unbridled greed present in every company is just a falsehood.
It should be noted, though, that the "if you aren't paying, you're the product" mantra isn't always true. FOSS exists.
And I know that seems obvious to anybody reading this on Lemmy, but I've had people refuse to use good open source software because they fundamentally refuse to trust something being provided to them for free.
That applies to the software itself, sure, but only if you bring your own infrastructure. Large scale FOSS infrastructure services are going to be the exception not the norm.
You can also feel good about supporting Proton. They are literally bootstrapped as a service and only rely on what we pay them. They never took any money from vc or other sources.
If you have more than one person who should/would/could move over to Proton, they have a family plan and every so often they bring back their visionary plan which is a better version of the family.
I'm particulay looking for.the functionality of Google Photos, not just a cloud storage solution but a photo catalogue integrated with my camera among other things. Does Proton offer this?
No, Ente has more photo gallery functionality though. Not sure about it being "integrated" with the camera. What do you mean by this?
The photos I take on my cellphone are instantly catalogued, scanned for metadata, and synchronized with my gallery. The app then gives me fun photo displays and reminders of my past daily.
I do nothing but take photos and pay a small fee.
There is a self hosted alternative for google photos if you have NAS. I don't remember the name and it's not nextcloud but that project have web and mobile apps to sync and they catalog photos with face and name similar to google. If you are specifically looking for storing and syncing photos mega.nz is decent but pricey alternatively pClound offers one time purchase during holiday season which is much more affordable.
Immich, is probably what you’re thinking of.
Yeah, thanks for reminding the name.
PhotoPrism is kind of that thing on self hosted NAS.
Or alternatively both biggest NAS makers Synology and Qnap have their own things for that.
Self hosted immich is by far the closest. It has many if the same features but all runs locally
Me too, trying to figure out what I'm gonna do about Gmail.
Lots of people here say Proton, but I'd also consider selfhosting my email on either a home server or the cloud, whichever meets my criteria for redundancy to stay online vs cost
I hear self-hosting email is a really complicated thing if you want it secure and all that. I never tried, just hearsay.
The only problem with self-hosting is that big coorps like google or microsoft will put you on their spam list, so your e-mails will land in the spam folder when you send emails to gmail or outlook addresses. Other than that it's not a huge hassle as stuff like https://mailcow.email/ or mailu or mail-in-a-box exist.
Ah, wow. Yeah. That's a big problem, or would be for me anyway. No time or energy to deal with that issue.
Just make sure you add DKIM and all that. Mail in a box will do it mostly for you and it should take care of the spam issues at least until someone reports your emails as spam. For a personal email that shouldn’t happen.
Basically sending emails without DKIM is like serving a webpage on HTTP; nobody should trust the page you got was not altered and the domain is properly registered.
Without dkim dmarc spf and all that stuff it won't even reach the spam folder, but get either silently dropped or rejected where mailer daemon will send you a nice message.
Safe yourself some time and use virtualmin if you want to host mail yourself.
I use a Nextcloud app called Memories for my photos. I don't know if it is one par with Google Photos but it's good enough for me. There are a few providers that offer managed Nextcloud servers, personally I use the one by Hetzner.
I'm an iPhone user, and i'll probably stay that way, but I've tried to de-google my life as much as possible and I'd consider de-appleing if there was an alternative that wasn't google'd up. What do anti-google self-host folks do about smartphones? Android is "open" i guess, but it's crammed full of adware and trackers and all sorts of garbage.
Linux for desktop is an easy-peasy transition; linux for mobile, no so much
Android devices with a non-deadlocked bootloader can be reflashed to have de-googled builds of Android. LineageOS isn't completely de-googled (it's damn close to it) but you can put that on any supported device without GApps and use it that way.
Apple is completely deadlocked, through and through, and you cannot de-Apple without completely abandoning their platform.
That's a bit hyperbolic and unfair to the point of being misleading.
"Android" is not one universal type of phone operating system. It, like Linux, has various distributions. Samsung makes their own version. as does Motorola, as does HTC and Nokia, as does OnePlus, Huawei, etc... The version of Android that comes with a Samsung phone is radically different than what comes with a Motorola phone. You cannot blame Google for what Samsung decides to include on their own strain of Android. You cannot blame Google for what shady Chinese brands put on their hardware.
Want an Android device that isn't crammed full of adware, trackers and all sorts of garbage? Stop buying garbage devices from garbage OEMs.
Motorola and Google are the two that (shock, surprise!) are the most open, always have unlocked bootloaders when bought directly and not through a carrier and have the most well supported devices if you decide to go with a custom rom.
I work for an Android OEM; i am quite familiar with GMS and AOSP versions of Android. I was unclear what i meant - software choices on Android are highly limited when trying to avoid adware and trackerware apks. It's just unfortunately a platform where the value extracted from it is way more often from provide free but not great software that also mines your life. not too many options for great software that also doesn't mine you, free or paid.
I suspect you feel that way because it's easier to know what DOES mine you, free or paid, on Android, than it is on any other mobile OS. Consequentially, it's also easier to block such stuff on Android with custom dns, custom roms, root and a hosts file or using apps to track the trackers like Exodus. So, no, I disagree: You say it's highly limited when trying to avoid those kinds of apps... We have F-Droid and other third party app stores. There's a plethora of FOSS apps that can replace the common garbage data collecting apps out there. People just don't want to make the effort and look a little bit harder elsewhere for what they would feel more comfortable using. That's why we have privacy nightmares: people are lazy.
I've considered the same, but the Google Photo smart auto-tagging is just too useful
https://github.com/nextcloud/recognize
https://github.com/matiasdelellis/facerecognition
make an issue on immich
That already works.