How I dumped Google

A few months ago, I decided to progressively stop using Google products. They are indeed good products (or were, see Google Reader), but I’m talking about other reasons, here.

Google products, by essence, are practical. You can login with your Google Account (almost) anywhere in the world, and you get a full range of applications to communicate, find information, or work with.

But there are other essential characteristics of these products :

• They are free. This may be an advantage for certain people, but not for me. I do prefer paying money for a service that I know is reliable, and I pay for it to be reliable, so that I have something to rant about when the service is not working (which is unlikely, I admit, but not impossible, and has happened in the past). In the same manner, Google can decide to suspend your account. You can virtually do nothing against that, and this has happened in the past. If I pay, I can be sure that my data is safe (as pointed by Brice in the comments, this is a horrible simplification, and is definitely not true). On a related note, I would be glad to give money to startups, if they were providing a service I need (in the same sense that buying a song instead of torrenting helps the artist).
• They are web-based. This is clearly an advantage, in a sense, but up to a certain point. Considering GMail, for example. When I perform an operation on my mail client, I don’t want to wait, it should be instantaneous. And as good as GMail is (and I’ve used it for 7 years), when you click to do something, there is sometimes a delay (probably the HTTP request) before you can do something. The same can be told about any shared and free web application, as far as I’ve experienced. This is simply a regression in my experience of the software. The 5% of the time I need to access my mail when I haven’t got my PC and I haven’t got connection on my smartphone is not worth the frustration I have when GMail is not responsive. This point is not against web applications at all. My self-hosted applications are fast-as-hell.
• They don’t protect your privacy. It is a know fact that Google reads your emails, and I consider email important enough not to let anyone read it. Well yeah, you can argue that only machines are reading my mail, and not humans, and that the email protocol is not safe, but at the end, I don’t want to have a third party to read my email, period.
• They don’t place you in control. When use an integrated solution, such as Google applications (or even a Mac, in a certain extent), I have no control on what I can and cannot do. If my mail client interface changes in the next version, I can choose to stay on the current version (even if sometimes, I should update, because of security fixes). If Google Reader changes, I cannot do anything. At most Google folks are kind enough to grant the user a transitional period when they can use the old interface. Don’t get me wrong, I love when software are evolving, but sometimes, the new version does not fit a certain usage anymore.

Now, let’s list the applications or services we need, and the feature they should have to be a decent competitor to Google services :

• An email provider, which has a decent web-based interface, as well as IMAP support, to stop using GMail ;
• A calendar server, which allows me to publish and share calendars with people that use Google Agenda or any other calendar software ;
• Instant messaging solution that can reach people on GTalk (because most of my friends are using GTalk) ;
• A Web-based RSS feed reader, with both desktop and mobile support, to be able to drop Google Reader ;
• A solution to host my photos, for my familly and friend to view them in a nice way, to ditch Picasa ;
• A solution to collaborate on documents with friends, to get rid of Google Docs ;

The ultimate goal of this experiment is therefore to have products that work (even after complicated installation/configuration, etc.), and are interoperable. Despite ranting about Google and the fact that the web should be distributed all day, most of the persons I interact on a daily basis don’t care (or are not aware), and use Google services extensively. For me to work/chat/interact with them, my services should be able to connect, or be compatible, with Google service.

Email

On the advice of several Mozilla folks, I started paying for the most expensive plan at http://fastmail.fm. It allows me to use a custom domain for my email address, a large number of those, file storage, etc.

I use Thunderbird, which has, to tell the truth, several minor bugs, but is fast, reliable, extensible. Almost anything I do which doesn’t involve the network is instant (reading email, composing email, searching through a huge amount of old email with crazy filters, etc.). I can use seamlessly a large amount of email account (university email, personal address, Mozilla email, exchange university account, etc.), and it just works. I don’t have to give my password to a third party browser plugin to have desktop notification, and I can compose my email without having the interface slowing down my typing. One killer feature for me : space goes to the next unread email, perfect for those crazy mornings when you received a ton of email during the night.

Fastmail does not have the sexiest web interface that exists. In fact, it is way inferior to GMail’s (which is arguably the best one out there, Microsoft’s Web-based Outlook being a good second). But as I said before, I can hardly use a web interface, now that I have used a native client, and it did the job perfectly when I had to write an email without having my phone nor my computer. All the feature you expect from a webmail are present except threading (or conversation, as they are called in GMail), which is kind of a big deal, but not much. SMTP is way faster and more reliable than GMail’s. The synchronization between PCs and devices is instantaneous, and reliable, whereas GMail’s get confused if the traffic is too high. I suspect the IMAP implementation of GMail is not very good (which is quite logical considering their market segment, which is the webmail client).

I use a very old Android smartphone (HTC G2, i.e. the second one released in the world), and the mobile web interface of Fastmail is not beautiful, but very efficient : fast, minimalistic. It does not have AJAX goodies, and it fits my usage perfectly. I think I will maybe switch to a native email client for my phone when I will change it (in the next few months or so), but as for now, I don’t know the state of the mobile email client market, so this might be a problem in the future. As a backup solution, I suppose I could install an email webapp on my server to have a nicer client on the mobile, though, but at the expense of researching and testing all the clients (remember that all I did for now was to enter my credit card number in fastmail’s website, and point my Thunderbird to it).

To finish, I know I could have hosted my email on a personal server, but I don’t trust myself enough to do so. Email, is for me, the primary mean of communication, both for work and personal life, and I want it to be up all the time, while my emails are safe and backuped.

This service costs about $40 a year, which is $3.33 a months. Considering a decent sandwich costs more than that where I currently live (Sweden), it is perfectly acceptable. Note that you can pay way less money if you don’t want the best plan http://fastmail.fm offers. For this price, you have 10Gb of space, attachments up to 50MB, 2GB space to store file (not very useful if you have your server), provides an XMPP server and is able to connect to GTalk (but more on that later).

A calendar server

I think I have found the cutest and easiest calendar server in the world : Radicale. It is written in Python, and does not add crapwares in your system, since it’s standalone (i.e. no dependencies).

To start a calendar server, type radicale in the command line (after having installed the package, of course). Then point your Thunderbird (equipped with the Lightning addon) (or any other software that supports the CalDav protocol, this includes iCal and a bunch of other software) to http://example.com/username/calendarname the calendars are created on the fly. You can add authentication (I let you dig in in the /etc/radicale/config, which is basically the unique configuration file), and a lot of other stuff, but I only use the basic functionalities.

I keep my Radicale instance in a tmux, but I guess you could wrap it in a /etc/init.d script, and it would be cleaner.

RSS web application

In the past, I used to use several RSS feed readers ; RSSOwl, Liferea, and a KDE software I have forgotten the name of, and it was always a pain when I wanted to add a new feed : I had to do it manually on all my devices. More over, the read/unread status of the articles where inconsistent: if I read an article on one device, it wasn’t mark as read on other devices. That was the primary reason why I switched to Google Reader in the first place.

But several month ago, I had just started to pay for the cheapest VPS plan at OVH, and figured out that I could host a web based RSS application. A guy at Mozilla was using Tiny Tiny RSS, so I decided to give it a shot.

Written in PHP, it uses MySQL as database (I seem to recall other option exist for the database, but this is my current setup), so it can be used on virtually any hosting plan in the world. It is currently the only software that require PHP and MySQL on my server, but it definitely worth an instance of those two software running. I find it way better than Google Reader (and I have used Reader for at least three years). It has all the features you need (and a lot of features you don’t need), and a nice mobile interface (which is responsive enough in my opinion not to have a native application. There is one for Android, if you feel the need for it). It is password protected, and you can even have multiple accounts. It imports OPML files seamlessly, so the transition with Google Reader is very easy. Basically, it was a drop in replacement, I don’t miss a single feature of Google Reader. TTRSS (as it is called by its author) is very fast, provides a rich web interface, and runs on your own server, usually with a huge bandwidth, so information retrieval are very very fast.

The development of TTRSS has somewhat slowed down, but the author still implements features and bug fixes. The single thing that is annoying, is that it binds several key combination (I think ctrl+pageup/down and ctrl+tab), in a way that it doesn’t change tab anymore in my Firefox. I might patch that in the future (or write a quick Firefox Jetpack addon or userscript), but it’s nothing terrible.

Photos hosting

There is lots of web-based images gallery, but I didn’t want a bloatware, so I settled on the old genethumb.sh by Sam Hocevar. But it was ugly. So I rolled out my own utility, yadfig, Yet Another Damn Fine Image Gallery, which has all the cool features (or at least the feature I need): command line driven, automatic thumbnail generation, nice HTML5/CSS3 frontend, static HTML pages generation, etc. Yes you can’t add comments, rate the pictures, but it doesn’t need anything apart from Python, a library to get the exif tags, and a web server to work. You can see an example here. And if it does not fit you needs, make a pull request, since it’s open-source and on Github. The codebase is tiny, so you should be able to do what you want in a minute.

Instant messaging

As a fastmail.fm user, it is trivial to have an XMPP server which is not Google’s : Fastmail provides for its paying customers an XMPP server, based on ejabberd. In your Empathy (or any other XMPP client), type in your fastmail.fm user name and password and voilà. Then you can import all you GTalk user list, and your good to go. Your contacts will have to confirm they know you, however.

I personally have a very basic usage of IM, I only use it for instant messaging, no crazy plugin, no group chat (I use IRC for that), and it works very well. I’ve heard that Fastmail’s XMPP server supports XMPP extension, and I might dig in it, but for now, I’m completely satisfied.

For now, my usage of this solution is however quite hypocritical. I still talk to people only on GTalk, but this experiment proves that if any of my contact switches to another provider, as long as he/she still uses XMPP, the hassle will be minimum, and that we can have a decentralized solution that works with a minimum of work. I’ve heard that you can connect to Facebook chat using a similar method, but I don’t use Facebook much these days, so this is not a strict requirement for me.

I might try to host my own XMPP server in the near future, though.

Document sharing and collaboration

This is probably the toughest part. When I’m working with programmer (which is most of the time), we happily use git with Github, or my own server, but when I have to collaborate with non-programmer, sometime Etherpad is enough, sometimes not. I’m looking forward to LOOL (LibreOffice OnLine), but in the meantime, I haven’t found a solution as user-friendly as Google Docs.

This is a shame, because Google Docs tends to produce horrible documents. Perhaps I should try more to push people (even non-technical) to Markdown (since it’s trivial to grasp the minimal subset you need), and Etherpad, and produce good quality documents, ready for the web (which is kind of a big deal), for a print using a LaTeX converter, and which does not use a crappy and slow web interface, with a nonsense WYSIWYG editor which makes you lose you time over styling for crappy result.

Conclusion

As for now, I have successfully replaced all the Google services I used with equivalent (or better) services. My GMail accounts is still active for spammy services and for the time I tell all the people who might want to communicate with me my new email address. I still need to find a better solution for the document sharing and collaboration part, but I was planning for a lot tougher transition. I rediscovered the joy of fast, responsive software in the process, and learnt a lot, which are both quite nice externalities.

I’ve not searched a replacement for the Google Search, since the last time I checked, the quality of alternative solutions was depressing. I might investigate in the near future, and I’ve heard Duck Duck Go is acceptable, so I might give it a shot.

If you have comments, alternative software or solution, or anything (relevant to this post) to say, please feel free to drop a comment, or contact me by all the means you find.

Paul 04 November 2011