Hey folks! I’ve been on a quest to degoogle and get more privacy in my life. I want to strike a good balance between privacy and usability, so while the most hardened apps out there might be best for privacy, maybe they are not great for usability.
My first step is a good mail and calendar provider with a good iOS experience. I’m using proton right now, but I’ve had issues with mail and calendar on mobile. Calendar has been slow and just not great to use. Mail is mostly okay but often I will delete mail and it will take ages for it to actually leave my inbox and it just feels unresponsive.
In the calendar app I need to be able to view a Google calendar. My work schedule is all in a Google workspace for my job and I need to at least see it for when I’m scheduling my personal stuff. I understand I most likely cannot create or edit events on it from a private app, but seeing it is a must.
Any good recommendations out there, or am I already just ok at Proton and I need to overlook what feels to me a subpar mobile experience?
Sounds like proton is building a complete and centralised ecosystem, kinda like Google. Sure, they’re not the same as Google, and you can probably trust them as far as security is concerned. But, for me, decentralization is key to privacy.
They are, but everything is encrypted on the user’s end, so that should make it more secure and more private.
And I largely agree. I self host a ton, I do full backups of my VPS and can spin a new clone up in a few hours even at home. I self hosted Mastodon, just got into Meshtastic, and everything in the cloud is synced locally at all times. I’ve spent a small fortune on NVMes, my laptop has 8TB, my Desktop similar plus a bunch of drives and 3 NASes with a total of around 0.25PB of hot storage on an all Wifi7 + 2.5GBE+ Network with backup shadow router and I consider a second internet connection so I could separate my hosted shit from daily use.
Decentralization is definitely one key but I’d say the real thing is interoperability - you have to be able to leave, whether its a hosted service, or a open source or self hosted app that stops being open source or self hostable (Minio, Retool), or is abandoned (TrueCrypt). They work hand-in-hand. The reason we can choose Proton, Gmail, StartMail, Hushmail, Atomic, whatever is because at the end of the day, you can use them with all other systems, they work with each other and you can always create your own.
Interoperability is what allows decentralization to be a thing. At least IMO.