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Comment by decentrality | Hacker News Reader

This is the first time I heard of DuckDuckGo. I am going to "try it for a week" on all my computers.

This might be just what I needed to start the much delayed escape from Google Search, GMail, and eventually Google Voice and Android. Chrome will probably be the hardest. That, though, I know is Chromium; maybe I can draw the line there.

Appreciated the comments that lead me to http://disconnect.me earlier today.

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I'm almost completely disconnected now. DDG is fine (usually ok, sometimes worse and very occasionally better), and there's always !i or !g if you start misssing google. FastMail costs money but is in my opinion better than GMail. I have SIP instead of google voice, although it doesn't provide free transcription which I would like. I have cyanogenmod on my android phone without the google apps, although I do miss some of them (plus a lot of the app library that depends on google play services). I actually really like firefox these days and use nightly on both android and my desktop, they sync nicely. I have a plugin (google disconnect) that stops other sites from telling google servers about my visit (blocks a massive number). This also causes youtube embeds not to work, but you can always click the icon and say unblock for now.

I use owncloud on a 60$ per year vps server for syncing calendar and contacts, dropbox functionality, rss reader etc. It's slow and not as good as google drive, but it's good enough and I have more space and full control.

So for me it costs about 110$ per year to disconnect from google, and not all of the replacements are as good, but some are better, and I definitely feel better about it.

I've done the same, although I still use Google Search, and Gmail -- when I finally decide to switch email, I will switch to a self-hosted one, preferably.

OwnCloud is quite awesome as of version 6. If you're still running 5, I highly suggest updating. I love it as a platform for building web apps, too: done right, and you can get things like a Google Reader alternative embedded within, and hooked into DAV and the like for access across many different clients.

I love it :)

I just need an off-site email as a fail-over for if my own cloud services are interrupted. I will always want to have some kind of third-party email service for absolutely-must-receive messages, like alerts from the cloud service provider. I live in fear of the day that one of those alerts sent by the virtualhost provider is information about an outage going on at that moment.

OwnCloud looks cool as a Zimbra replacement possibly, for the personal storage aspect, while I finish coding my own stuff.

You use your own domain with fastmail. You can switch to it now, migrate all your gmail to it, set your gmail to forward to it, and if you later decide you hate it, you can switch to self-hosted by just changing your mx records.

Before I went to gmail I was self hosted and I had so much trouble with people not receiving my email because my server wasn't trusted, and me not receiving emails occasionally because my server would occasionally be down or busy. Not to mention the spam filtering was much better on gmail than my own server.

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