Grounding the Cloud


Easy steps to become more Privacy- 

and Eco-conscious Online.

In the Netherlands we reccomend using Triodos or ASN.

Avoid visa, pay pal or Tikkie. To send money to people you know just use the service of your bank. For a money split app use Splitt.

We recommend using Brave browser or Duck Duck Go browser.

Within your new browser you can swich to Ecosia (eco), Duck Duck Go or Brave.

Infomaniak: This is the easyiest and fastest way to make your whole digital workspace more eco-friendly and privacy friendly. Infomaniak has an email service, calendar, drive, video call, ethical integrated eco AI, website building and hosting, online device backup, newsletter, video platform, big file transfer.

You get 15gb of storage for free. They leave no reason to stay at google 😉

Other ecosystems could be Murena or Proton which are not eco-friendly but at least privacy concious.

We recommend using Bitwarden or find another private alternative like Proton or Nextcloud. It would be wise to redo all your old passwords, since cracking passwords is getting more and more easy. You can use random generated ones from Bitwarden. Bitwarden also has a synchronized phone app.

To stay in the green and private ecosystem of infomaniak, K-mail and K-calendar are your best choice. The second best choice would be to use Tuta mail (eco and private) or Proton (only private), If you need to keep your old email provider, you might not want the standard mail app on your phone. K9 app collects no data, but the provider will.

We are very enthousiastic about GreenPT.ai ! It works on green energy, is private and a Dutch company (under EU law). Try it for a month 😉

To stay in the green and private ecosystem of infomaniak, Euria is your best choice.

Venice.ai is not eco but private, just like Brave ai ‘leo’ and duck.ai

We suggest to slowly stop using the messaging apps you are using and join us on Signal. Ask friends to continue over signal instead and create the same group chats over signal.

Many services -like whatsapp and messenger- they encrypt messages, but the automatic backup they make is not encrypted, so they do collect all your messages over their service. 

· Youtube: FreeTube (mac app), Newpipe (android), yewtu.be and Piped (website). These make sure Google does not earn money on you looking at their video’s. (As do the creators, sadly)

If you want to upload your video’s Infomaniak or Peertube is a good alternative, but it won’t be uploaded on Youtube.

To stay in the green and private ecosystem of infomaniak, K-drive is your best choice.

Tuta is going to release a green and private cloud soon, but it is not released yet. In the mean time you can use mailbox.org (eco), Nextcloud with a eco server like Greenhost, or proton (not eco but at least private)

Swisstransfer (green, private and part of the infomaniak ecosystem) or use a self hosted Nextcloud drive.

We-Transfer uses everything you upload to train AI.

We recommend Deep L, however it does have ‘new AI’ features. As alternative you could use Lingva Translate, a front-end for google translate.

Notesnook or Standard Notes work great. Nextcloud has a notes app too (but it is rather basic).

Cryptpad for browser, Libre Office for computer app, Nextcloud or K-drive for online and live editing.

Organic Maps app, also known as open street map for phone (and mac app). For browser use mapcarta.

Join us at Pixelfed.

Join us at Mastodon.

Join us at Bluesky.

As alternative Loops (fediverse) is cool. If you like to watch TikToks uploaded on TikTok, we would recommend watching them trough a frontend with the browser using ProxiTok.

Join us at Lemmy. If you want to use a frontend, use Redlib.

Free: Riseup VPN, Calyx VPN,
Payed: Windscribe, Proton VPN

To stay in the green and private ecosystem of infomaniak, K-drive is your best choice.

For private use Signal does the job. But if you need a professional alternative – to share screens etc – we recommend using Jitsi Meet or Jami. As alternative for Discord use Mattermost or Element X.

Downloading and buying directly from the artist looks like the best way. However It is not as simple as a streamingservice. If you need to play any song any time we sadly recommend Apple Music 🙁 
It seems the most private option where the artists get the most money.
Otherwise look at Bandcamp.

To stay in the green and private ecosystem of infomaniak, their website creator is your best choice along with their green hosting and domain name registration.

We recommend using WordPress and an eco host such as Greenhost (NL)

We recommend using menstruator, Drip, Tyd.

To make sure Google is not collecting your data on your phone we recommend installing a different OS – see ‘Next Step’. But for now:

To download open source apps on android, install F-Droid app store. There you can download all the standard apps from Fossify (clock, contacts, phone, sms, music, calculator, files, voice recorder etc)

As Keyboard we recommend Futo. It looks like G-board and has functions like speech to text.

Apart from the browser, email and text editors there are some other apps we would recommend as standard apps of your Mac.

If you want to use apple or google photo’s, turn off online backup and do not use the cloud. 

Little snitch is an app that puts you in control over all the data that is going in and out of your macbook over the network.

The Fediverse is a collection of social networking services that are based on free and open-source software. The services can communicate with each other using a common protocol. Users of different websites can send and receive status updates, multimedia files and other data across the network.