These stories of people being banned by google without recourse are so common, it's amazing that anyone here is still using google for anything important. First of all, get off of gmail. If you do nothing else, get off of gmail. I'm very happy with fastmail, they provide email, calendar, contacts, notes, and some cloud storage for a monthly fee.
I've also come to love nextcloud, I started using it to replace google photos, but there are tons of other great features too. I use it for photos, notes, calendar, contacts, news, and some collaboration stuff. It's open source, you can self-host, or get a hosted account somewhere.
While you're degoogling, start using duckduckgo for search. It's a better experience than google these days, and if you really want to send a query over to google, just add !g to the end of the search.
Get off of Chrome too. I would prefer that you use firefox, but chromium works fine too.
Getting off of google voice took a bit more work. I ported my number to Telnyx, wrote a SMS-to-XMPP bridge, and set up Asterisk to route voice calls. I'm happy with that solution but it won't be practical for most, so maybe someone else can comment on google voice alternatives.
>I would prefer that you use firefox, but chromium works fine too.
The rest of your comment seems fair, and equally very interesting, and I'll follow up with fastmail and nextcloud - thanks, but just the particular "I would prefer that you....", seemed jarringly out of place, and made me somewhat happier I use [a heavily customised] Brave [with a very edited hosts file], for no other good reason than ff just doesn't do it for me, as much as I've tried, and tried to like it.
That's fair, I just think it's a shame that Firefox's market share has grown so low. It's still my favorite. I also believe that Blink hegemony is bad for open web standards. Use what you want, but not chrome.
I've also come to love nextcloud, I started using it to replace google photos, but there are tons of other great features too. I use it for photos, notes, calendar, contacts, news, and some collaboration stuff. It's open source, you can self-host, or get a hosted account somewhere.
While you're degoogling, start using duckduckgo for search. It's a better experience than google these days, and if you really want to send a query over to google, just add !g to the end of the search.
Get off of Chrome too. I would prefer that you use firefox, but chromium works fine too.
Getting off of google voice took a bit more work. I ported my number to Telnyx, wrote a SMS-to-XMPP bridge, and set up Asterisk to route voice calls. I'm happy with that solution but it won't be practical for most, so maybe someone else can comment on google voice alternatives.