Just wanted to share some insights after migrating away from Google et al. Curious to hear about others experience.

Please keep a few things in mind when reading this:

• the goal is not to be perfect - this is a long process that will never stop and it's just the start
• personally prefer self-hosted open source to alternatives that might be better at avoiding US, but have too much of a negative impact on my productivity
• you don't have to tackle everything all at once... small steps count too

Sharing this in hopes of inspiring someone to try an alternative or two. Also to hopefully hear about other experiences and what worked best for you.

TL:DR

Migrated from the big G to Vivaldi (browser), Proton (mail), Nextcloud (calendar, full collabora office suite, storage) , Immich (photos), Graphene OS (android).

DONE

Successfully migrated my Google accounts: private (16+ years) and my business Google Workspace - subscription now fully eliminated.

• Email: For now my emails will be with Proton. I know about the situation with their CEO, but wanted to make use of my standing subscription. Will be easy to switch again once it runs out. Proton import with the included migration tool was a breeze.

• Calendar: Tried the calendar but sync interval for remotely subscribed calendars is not high enough for my needs. Happy with the Nextcloud calendar feature.

• Office: Already running a Nextcloud instance for years and enabled contacts + calendar (caldav sync, carddav sync on android) and their office bundle (based on Collabora). Did an in-depth comparison of Cryptpad and Collabora and preferred the latter.

• Photos: Immich is just so good. Set up an instance for our family and everyone is so happy to not worry about Apple/Google storage subscriptions - and the awesome features immich brings. Handles our combined 130k images/videos well.

• Cloud storage: Would love a native Proton Drive sync client for Linux. For now my main storage will stay with Nextcloud.

• OS: Can highly recommend Ubuntu - a bit biased as long-time user. Finally made the switch from stock Android to Graphene OS. Love it so far. Would not recommend it to inexperienced users / non-tech people. Lineage might be more suitable. Love the discussions in this community lately introducing us to /e/OS, Sailfish, PostmarketOS, etc. I hope to see Sailfish and PostmarketOS go mainstream within a few years.

• Browser: Hard to decide as there are so many schools of thought and very vocal groups. Did some in-depth comparisons and decided to at least break free from Chrome for now. Went with Vivaldi and if they are forced to abandon manifest v2 I have LibreWolf and Floorp already set up as alternatives. Can highly recommend Floccus to sync bookmarks between devices (including mobile).

WIP

• Notion: Self-hosted AppFlowy looks promising, but have not tested it lately if it covers all my needs.

• Bitwarden: Hardest to let go for me personally, but might look into Vaultwarden. If Vaultwarden sucks and I really need to ditch Bitwarden it will most likely be Keepass based.

Hey,

if you are a fan of shareable instance agnostic Lemmy links and Photon UI you can now use lemsha.re for shareable links with built-in photon support.

Why? Because I love the interface and use it daily.

Code hosted at https://codeberg.org/lemshare/lemshare

lemsha.re now supports Photon UI for Lemmy

Try Photon UI at phtn.app

The lemsha.re source code is available at https://codeberg.org/lemshare/lemshare

Hey 👋,

I got frustrated with the friction for users from direct links to all the different instances they don't have accounts for and built https://lemsha.re/

It's inspired by matrix.to - but built for Lemmy content.

If a user clicks a lemsha.re link the user will be presented with two options:

• visit the original link, or
• view the same content - but on their preferred instance

Hope you find it useful.

...and some images for social share embeds

Inspired by matrix.to for Matrix we wanted to reduce friction when sharing Lemmy links. The idea is simple: instead of directly linking to a Lemmy page we first ask the user if they prefer to visit the original or another instance.

We call that a Lemshare. At the moment Lemshare links are limited to Lemmy community and user profile links.

You can create your own Lemshares here: https://gohug.eu/lemshare/

A bit hesitant to post, but here it goes.

When Buy European started it got me immediately hooked into implementing practical changes in my everyday life. One of the first steps was de-googling myself (as much as possible), and with that change my default search engine. For that I built a custom simple start page that offers a European alternative at random https://gohug.eu/

My collection of saved posts, bookmarks, and notes became a bit cumbersome. So I decided to add a bit more to the website and list the main resources, to always come back to. Hope some of you find it helpful too: https://gohug.eu/join/

So here it is. A web devs way of trying to participate and give something back. Cheers

Hey 👋,

I am amazed by what's happening. This community is great.

Two thoughts:

• The main reason this whole thing is so exciting for me is because it means change. It's such a great feeling to disrupt old habits and re-evaluate everything that I got so comfy with over the last decades. Please keep your recommendations coming. So much new (and better) alternatives to discover.

• While I love "Buy European", in reality my heart realized it's more about "Avoid US". Hey friends from non-European countries!

Thank you!

Hey 👋

Just started self-hosting photon app a few days ago and am very interested in your experiences?

Running on v2.0.0-rc.4 and just love the UX in comparison to lemmy native. I am experiencing some issues though. Nothing too major. Some issues might be due to me being inexperienced self-hosting. Also don't want to clog github issues with unwarranted claims.

Hope some of you can chime in with your experience here and help me find the root cause. List ordered by personal preference:

1. Random loading issues when sorting by Hot/Twelve hours. Might be related to my main instance lemm.ee. I think they did change some server settings (cloudflare, DDOS IIRC and downtime a few days ago) and around the same time the issues started. I click my bookmark for the photon front page and the screens stays black with only the logo in the center. If I manually remove the sort setting from my browser local storage it starts working again, but can not select Twelve hours. Happens a few times a day at random. Other times it works. Have not tried to reproduce in phtn.app when it happens, but will the next time. Browser console says failed requests, might be some server-side blocking of lemm.ee? Would be great if photon did catch the exception and show at least the UI instead of the loading screen. You can not navigate anywhere / fix the UI when it was opened with a direct link.

2. Posts don't refresh after changing sort params, only after hard page refresh. Seems to be an issue - saw it on github already and a comment that this was fixed a few hours ago. => Is there an easy way to run master branch bleeding edge instead of tagged releases? Currently only self-hosting for myself and nobody would notice restarts / downtimes.

3. Pinned custom menu items gone since the latest stable version. Might have just been dropped on purpose? Could not find an explanation or issue on github though. Was a nice feature.E.g. there seems to be no way to go to the front page other than clicking the photon icon in the top left corner. Or a quick way to jump into my own submissions, etc.

4. Custom favicon not working I think I set the param right and I see my favicon path inserted into the source code. Path works and image is served if I open it manually in browser. Maybe only if photon is not tied to a single instance?

5. Minor personal preference: on really large screens it would be great if the top navigation bar would not stretch full screen width, but start and end with the main sidebar & content area. The top left logo and buttons in the top right corner disappear to the very far edges and make photon harder to use.

Looking forward to hear about similar experiences and find out what I'm doing wrong / raise valid issues & feature requests on github.

Edit: Also automatic "mark read" of the inbox notification badge seem to be wonky. Have not had time to debug in detail, but it only works some times. Not that big of a deal though as there is a dedicated "mark all read" buttons.

Edit 2: 2.0.0-rc5 was released a few hours ago and fixes the major two issues. Thank you @Xylight@lemdro.id !