There are unfortunately going to be aspects of your life where you have to use Google. School, and later your job being major ones. If your teacher/boss says you have to use Google, you are going to use Google. With much love for the teachers, many are not good with technology and the convenience of Google makes their job easier.

Like many of us do at our jobs, just use Google to the minimum extent possible and try to minimize the personal information you give to Google. Then you can live the De-Google life in your free time.

This is probably not the answer you wanted, but it’s the practical one. Sometimes being the one person going against the grain can put a target on your back and you don’t want to get on the teacher’s bad side.

Of course, if your teacher is open to allowing you to use other tools, that’s great. I just wouldn’t get your hopes up.

Freetube is great. It accesses Youtube privately.

For Gmail – I use Thunderbird for both Android and Desktop (linux) to access my Gmail. I’m sure they are still reading my emails on the server side, but at least the phone app isn’t tracking me 🤣

Respectfully… if someone came here looking for a note-taking app, would you recommend pad and paper?

I am not looking for advice on my local issue advocacy, I am looking for a software solution to host a petition.

I think cryptpad will do the job.

Okay buddy, you are way overthinking this. I’m not trying to create the next change.org here. The scope of this is a petition to put a stop sign on main street and get maybe 50 people to sign on.

I could always use a Google Form or a Wordpress plugin for this, I thought there might be a more private way to go about it.

I did not expect all of this debate over a software recommendation, haha.

For your information, petitions can be quite effective at the local level. The problem is, if you sign a petition on Change.org or something like that, they start bombarding you with emails to sign other similar petitions (kind of like the recommendation algorithms on sites like Youtube or Facebook).

People who sign these things know full well what they are doing. Advocacy is not anonymous. I am guess the folks giving me grief about asking for a petition tool won’t sign them, and that’s fine. I just don’t see why there is so much hate.

Another option I considered is a form to mail script. I thought that this is a common use case and something would already exist, haha.

All apps collect some information. Piefed requires your email to sign up.

I don’t want the free petition websites online getting my personal network’s info and sharing or selling it, hence the interest in self hosting.

I was agreeing with you 🙂

It has to be approved in both houses and be signed by the Governor to become law. So far it has passed the New Hampshire State House.

The devs at SearXNG have a bot that regularly scans the public instances for changes to the source code and delists them as a public instance if it’s altered.

If you go to https://searx.space/, they show the results of the scans for each instance.

The software is free and open source. You are encouraged to inspect the code yourself to make sure no data is collected!

Here is the source code:

https://github.com/searxng/searxng

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There is also a list of publicly operated SearXNG instances at https://searx.space/. We host the one at https://search.freestater.org/, and there are plenty of other good ones.