Alternative tech

Over the past couple of years, I have undertaken an exercise of sorts to reduce my dependence on American tech giants. Inspired by others, I thought I’d pen a short post on what services I’ve moved and where.

Underpinning a lot of this is my domain name and web hosting. Hosting was already with Hetzner (Germany) for many years. For my domain names, I moved them to OVH (France/Ireland) from Hover. The service is just as good as Hover and it’s cheaper too.

Email had been with Apple iCloud+, but it was quite easy to move over to Zoho (India). There were other options for email but I wanted a service with integrated calendar and file storage to replace iCloud file storage and a reliance on Google Calendar.

Notes were trickier. I used to use Apple Notes, with a lot of tagging and linking set up. I tried a few options, but settled on Obsidian (Canada). I get the added bonus of being able to access my notes across macOS, iOS, iPadOS, Android, and Windows without having to rely on a finicky progressive web app.

Social media was easy, I’m on retro.pizza for Mastodon (US, but open source and indie) and I migrated my Atmosphere account to Eurosky (Netherlands/Germany). I think there’s definitely a bit of a challenge in explaining what alternative PDSs are and why they matter, but the architecture of Bluesky and Mastodon offer a good model for using tech on a human scale. Thanks to the diversity of both the Fediverse and Atmosphere, I can happily avoid Instagram and Facebook.

The rest of the services are a hodgepodge: CoMaps (open source) for hiking and cycling navigation instead of Google Maps (though I still have to use Google Maps for sharing directions and such), Symfonium (indie) connected to a Bluetooth speaker for online radio and music playback instead of a Google Home speaker and YouTube Music, self-hosted FreshRSS (free software/indie) for syncing feeds to NetNewsWire and Capy Reader instead of iCloud sync or Feedly.

A few services are stuck with Google though. I haven’t found a good cross-platform alternative to Google Photos for photo storage and sharing. Even if I did find one, I’m tied into Google by the network effect of shared albums. Google Docs is also hard to quit as a solution for shared docs and spreadsheets to manage the household. WhatsApp is a continual annoyance in its inevitability for messaging in Europe, though I’ve got some conversations on to Signal.

Finally, though I have a Perplexity Pro subscription (bundled with my bank account, ugh), I think I’m proudest of my alternative for generative AI: a Lamy Safari (Germany) fountain pen and a Rollbahn notebook. Putting pen to paper cuts through the friction that otherwise could tempt me to try AI.