I just found this when looking for Canadian alternatives. Anyone else hear about gander? I’m doing my best to support home grown and open alternatives but I have to choose what I am doing on the platform. It’s unlikely that my older family will ever leave Facebook, but honestly, what do I miss by not being present there? Birthday posts on my wall and the latest vacation picture…

  • Reannlegge@lemmy.ca
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    20 hours ago

    I am fairly confident it is hosthero.ca. I have the know how to use a VPS, I just do not want to manage a VPS (well I would like to have fun and try maybe sometime just not now). I just need to find ways to get away from US service providers.

    On the topic of VPS I do not know if you want to count this or not but I use wireguard as a VPN into my home lab; which hosts my Jellyfin server, all my *arr apps, and my pihole. It does host a lot of space across my three pi’s with MVNe drives I have tried hosting my own Nextcloud but made a booboo and broke it so I went out and got a sync.com subscription for my cloud storage.

    Across all the services hosted by Apple, Wordpress, and whatever else I was paying for just cannot think of them now I am paying considerably less for my stuff.

    • Dhar@lemmy.ca
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      13 hours ago

      Thanks very much for the informative reply, I’ll look into all those.

      • Reannlegge@lemmy.ca
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        5 hours ago

        I paid good money a few years ago to get my info stripped from data brokers; as I live in Saskatchewan they could/would only do the bare minimum, which was still a lot do not get me wrong so I got next to no spam. I run a pihole on my LAN so I have some tracker protection as well to block trackers from getting my email. I was using Apple’s hide my feature so all the new things I would sign up for would have their own unique emails.

        When I was pricing out the plans I realized it was less expensive to get whatever their least expensive web hosting was and their plan with unlimited emails. I am moving my password manger out of Apple’s walled garden into 1Password, I knew I was not going to easily export passwords from Apple’s password manager into another so I started doing that manually. I knew I was going to have to jump through the hoops to change emails for some things (totally forgetting I had 70 odd icloud addresses), when I was reading somewhere that my ISP (Sasktel) was no longer giving out email addresses and had moved to an exchange server. I do not want my emails getting anywhere near Microsoft’s grubby little fingers, even if it is through a protocol they lease out to providers or companies so I started separating my emails even going to, what I called my professional email address, I am currently sitting at 110 separate email addresses and still have not made it through all of my addresses yet.

        How do I manage all those email addresses? Well you see 6 of those emails are “main addresses” which everything gets forwarded to depending on what they are, in case an address gets spammy I can more easily find the stuff and it will help me keep all my things sorted. Every so often I try to say I will keep my mailbox clean, that lasts for a little bit but then it falls apart i am hoping that keeping everything in their own address and then forwarding to a “main address,” will help me stay on top of that more.