Let’s imagine we live in a world the American government is not the American government so you can trust what American companies say when they talk about protecting your privacy and so on…
Let’s imagine we live in a world the American government is not the American government so you can trust what American companies say when they talk about protecting your privacy and so on…
Alas we don’t live in such a world and I think, as much as possible, it’s safer to not trust much of the US apps and services. Like I said, as much as possible I want to use made in the EU software and services, or EU-made forks of those. But it’s not always doable.
For example, I use the Vivaldi Browser (Chromium) and Waterfox (Firefox fork). I use LibreOffice for writing. I have multiple emails, all EU-based (Proton, Infomaniak + my French-hosted own web domain/email). I don’t use AI, but if I did I would use the French Mistral (is that its name? Not sure about that) and maybe give Proton a try too. I use one cloud from Swiss and another from Germany (this one E2EE).
Search is where I’m stuck. I use the French Qwant but I also use (and pay good money) to use the US-based Kagi search engine. To me, Kagi is unrivaled and offers a mix of features (great search results and many cool options to filter said results), ease of noise-removal (no ads, no seo and the ability to remove specific domains from search results,…) and they promise to not track us at all. Alas, since it’s a US company and since they can’t rise above US law, I simply consider that whatever I search using them is compromised.
I remember using DuckDuckGo a few years ago and I quite liked it. But if I have to use a US search engine that must be Kagi. It’s really good and, nope, I’m not sponsored to say that… As a matter of fact, being a paid-user, it is I that is sponsoring them ;)
Run/self host Searxng on a cheapass VPS. I picked up one for testing before production a long time ago, runs me $25/year. Spin up Docker, Portainer, and Searxng in an hour or less. Add your Searxng instance to Firefox search engine and make it default. Secure the VPS with UFW, Fail2Ban, and if you’re the only user, make use of the host.allow and host.deny files to pretty much weed out the baddies. Jack’s a doughnut, Bob’s your uncle.
I don’t hear a lot of noise about self hosting here in the Privacy chan, but if you’re looking to cut out corporate services from your repertoire, self hosting is a great way.
Thx. It is an idea I considered a while ago, like selfhosting as much things as I can, but looking at it and reading the various docs/help I realized it was way above my skills, at least that I wouldn’t feel confident I’m doing it right/safely. For context, I’m well into 50s and even though I run Linux i’m not that much of a geek (I’m already very happy I can blog using Markdown + a static website generator ;)
That’s cute…I just turned 71 recently. LOL Just givin’ ya the piss bro. But I understand your conundrum. I’ve had a computer in front of me since about the mid 70s and the Altair, and it’s not that I have some impressive repository of intellect, I’ve just screwed up enough along to way to learn a thing or two. Do, screw it up, nope that’s not it. #@#$ Do it again, hey that works, write that shit down!
Getting into self hosting did drive home the enormity of traffic on the tubes. You are kind of aware of the amount of traffic, but not really first hand until you open your first port and watch as a vast horde of bots pull a train on your little server relentlessly. They are like piranha and can smell an open port 22 from half way around the world.
There is a competent self hosting chan here: https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted. Good guys there ready to help. Like I said, I possess no great wealth of intelligence, but if you ever want somebody to bounce a few ideas off of, I’m always down to help in any way.