Non-US alternatives to digital services
Non-US alternatives to digital services
From a practical standpoint, the country that hosts many digital services is undergoing rapid political change. For awareness of non-US alternatives, check out:
So proton is out these days right? Does anyone have thoughts on fastmail?
Fastmail is really, really nice.
Tuta > Proton
I like they they only do email and calendar. It's best to not keep too many eggs in the same basket, and the pricing for Proton seems to discourage that.
The only downside is that Tuta doesn't provide an
.onionservice as Proton does (although they leak clearnet links left and right)... even though they apparently plan to.
Proton is still a great product.. easy to switch away from Google, especially if you don't have the time to self host or manage the complexity of 5 different services. I am aware of recent discussion, and have decided for myself that overreacting is not necessary, though that's up to you :)
Nowadays I half suspect any tech CEO to have some questionable mindset (to say the least). So it seems more important to me, what the company actually does. I hope everyone complaining about Proton now also does not use Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, X, Apple products, and the list goes on. Their CEOs are definitely a lot worse.
Long time customer and super happy with Fastmail. Its a bit pricy but the service is great.
Yeah it could be argued that Fastmail is less private than alternatives, but they make a damn good service. Plus email shouldn’t be used for secure communication anyways.
I joined Fastmail almost a month ago and am really enjoying it, I especially like the integrated masked emails.
I went over to purelymail, but it's in .us
It's not fancy encrypted like proton, but it's very affordable and straight forward to set up for your own domains.
Bookshop.org just recently added ebooks, and I believe they have a UK store, for anyone trying to buy ebooks in a more ethical way. It allows you to select a local bookstore of your choosing and support them when you purchase books. They take a small fee to cover their warehousing and shipping I think, but pass along a lot of the profit (80%) to the local bookstore. They’re a certified b corp and their bylaws say they can’t sell to a major retailer (eg amazon).
Posteo is another alternative for Mail that a lot of people overlook.(And far more "real privacy" than fucking Proton)
Bitwarden sadly still is a US company and while it hosts in EU as well, some might not think this is enough. In that case Vaultwarden can be selfhosted easily.
It is not that much work to actually get rid of most possibly unreliable US services,but it's far more work to get other people to switch as not all services are interoperable yet....
Question: why would you store passwords with an external service?
I have a local database synched with SyncThing between phones and computers and an external copy on a server.
Sometimes I need a password when I don't have my devices with me, and logging into the Bitwarden web vault is super convenient. Also, everything is encrypted on the client, and the client is FOSS, so there's very little risk.
You can also host your own Bitwarden server, or use an independent alternative (Vaultwarden).
Bitwarden provides a lot of convenience without much compromise.
Good points. I do believe Bitwarden is open-source though, so it can probably be forked off into a version that doesn't host data in the US.
You can always self-host it as well.
A good post to mention [email protected].
The irony of this community being hosted on feddit.uk
PeerTube seems fine for a YT alternative (only because it's pretty much either it or Odysee, that's what happens when you have an effective monopoly on user-generated content like YT does, and PeerTube IMO needs to take off sooner rather than later given how ridiculous YT's censorship has gotten lately), and then of course Lemmy (this platform) is looking really good so far as a Reddit alternative and I've only been on it for a day now, ditto for Pixelfed as an Instagram alternative.
And then of course there's Mastodon for a Twitter/Facebook alternative.
Also, Matrix seems fine for a Discord alternative, but moderation is all over the map.
Moderation is actually good on Matrix, also XMPP is a good alternative as well
https://makertube.net/ is the PeerTube instance that I've been using, and it's been great.
Adding to this, pipepipe (for YouTube) on f droid is amazing. Not sure where it's based but they do great work.
They don't do all of what Proton does, but for email Hushmail is run out of Vancouver. The free account is quite limited in terms of space though, but it's free.
Looking for android app alternatives
Check out https://f-droid.org/en/
Does anyone have a good recommendation for an S3 provider? I'm looking at Hetzner and OVH.
Hetzner's S3 is immature, they just started beta last year, and are rough at the edges
Hetzner is rock solid in my experience (and I run multiple server with them both for private and business use). I really can't complain.
I have my S3 backups at Ionos these days, they are also fairly large, only marginally more expensive and so far it's working well. Their cloud/VPS service (the proper one,not the consumer one) is also decent and offers a few (rarely needed) options that Hetzner doesn't have.
Hetzner support is usually quite good, something I can't say of the (albeit much more limited) experiences with OVH.
I think OVH would be a good choice.