When I was looking to replace my google tools, I couldn’t find an easy to to alternative Google Photos. Things that were suggested like immich or Synology or ente required some level of technical know how or dedicated hardware. I ended up buying a Synology drive but I have issues with loading images/videos (it’s extremely slow).
Today I stumbled upon https://stingle.org/
I haven’t used it yet, but it looks like it might be a good option for anyone wanting to degooglify, but without all the extra fuffing around.
It also has a F-Droid distro!
Pricing starts at 1gb for free or 100gb for three bucks
If anyone get’s a chance, let me know if it’s really that good.
Problem is, self hosted solutions require an investment into dedicated software. And even still, it doesn’t work that well. As I said, my Synology Photos will load photos after a while, but videos is a whole different story. And it’s not the internet connection in my case
Typically the point of de-googling is to get independent. If you just go to another SaaS solution, you trade one dependency for another dependency. They can lock you out from one day to the next, increase their prices, change their terms of service, etc.
Also if one of the reasons to turn your back to Google is that they should no longer have access to your data, then look up what the SaaS provider you are turning to is hosting with. Chances are high they are using Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. So your data still ends up on machines of the big three.
I disagree. The point of de-googling can be to get more independent, yes. But it can also be to get away from the monopoly and power of google and the other large internet companies. I cannot see how many people will start self-hosting in the near future, this is a viable solution only to tech-savy people. Instead, we should also look for other, more convenient ways to change how the internet is organized. Someone already mentioned ente as an alternative to google photos. Ente is as far as I can tell a privacy-respecting company. By using services like this or also kagi, people are contributing as well to another type of internet. We can either have our own hardware like you and selfhost. Or we pay others for their services, but with money not with our data. In general we certainly need a diversification of the internet.
I recently tried pikapods (https://www.pikapods.com/), they provide a pretty easy and stable way to run software like immich. The prices are reasonable as well, I’d say.