Sean's Blog

Google & Co Ejector

Is closed source, centralized software still part of your digital life? Eject now and start using free open-source software (FOSS). This is a small curated collection of awesome FOSS, capable of replacing many popular, centralized, privacy invading online services so you can sleep better at night.

Awesome FOSS Alternatives

Alternatives to privacy invading data kraken services.

Google Chrome:

Google Search:

  • SearX (Code) - Privacy-respecting metasearch engine, self-hostable

Perplexity:

WhatsApp / Telegram / Signal:

  • Matrix (Code) - end-to-end encrypted, federated, self-hostable

Google Docs:

  • Fileverse (Code) - end-to-end encrypted, real-time collaborative editing, self-hostable
  • Cryptpad (Code) - end-to-end encrypted, real-time collaborative editing, self-hostable

Google Drive / Dropbox:

  • Syncthing (Code) - decentralized, self-hostable, fast & unix aligned

Google Calendar / Contacts:

Facebook / Twitter:

YouTube:

  • Invidious - privacy respecting YouTube frontend
  • PeerTube (Code) - decentralized, federated, self-hostable

Spotify:

HTTP(S):

  • IPFS (Code) - decentralized, self-hostable

Github / Gitlab / Bitbucket:

Export All Your Google Data

...using https://takeout.google.com/ and delete your account.

Converting Google Docs files to Markdown

  1. Install Pandoc to convert docx to markdown
  2. Change dir to your Google Drive export: Takeout/Drive
  3. Create a lua script named fix_underline_links.lua with this content:
function Link(el)
  local content = el.content
  if #content == 1 and content[1].t == "Underline" then
    content = content[1].content
  end
  return pandoc.Link(content, el.target)
end
  1. Run this bash command to convert:

$ find . -name "*.docx" -type f -exec sh -c 'pandoc "$0" -o "${0%.docx}.md" --extract-media=./images/ --lua-filter=fix_underline_links.lua' {} \;

  1. Remove all docx files: $ find . -type f -name "*.docx" -delete

Glossary

End-to-end encrypted means your data is en- & decrypted only on your machine, resulting in maximum security with maximum responsibility (password loss equals data loss).

Self-hostable means anyone can run the software by themselves and thus maintain control of their data independently of any central authority.

Decentralized means the software does not need to communicate over the internet with a central server in order to work, instead it is capable of communicating independently via peer-to-peer based networking (very useful when dealing with limited internet availability or censoring governments).

Federated means instances of the software build a so called "fediverse" allowing users to communicate across instances.

More Resources