Alternatives I Have Personally Tried And Liked
In Person Groceries > Basically anywhere but Walmart. Look for “Product of Canada” on packaging. “Made in Canada” is 2nd best. If the company is Canadian that is the 3rd best. For produce with no packaging ask someone at the store.
Ordering Groceries > Voila if you’re not in BC, Save-On-Foods if you are in BC. I use Voila and it even has a shop Canadian tab.
Amazon > Home Hardware, Princess Auto, KMS Tools, BMR, and Lee Valley for in person shopping. If you’re going to order online use the Canadian Tire App.
Google Drive > Sync. If anyone uses someone’s referral code they both get 1 extra GB so here’s mine. https://www.sync.com/?_sync_refer=181a30ae0
X > Mastadon / Bluesky
Netflix and Prime > Crave and CBC Gem
Disney Plus > Ahoy Matey, Sail the Seas
Uber Eats > Skip the Dishes
Burger King / Mcdonalds > Any of these companies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Canadian_restaurant_chains
Starbucks / Mcdonalds Coffee > A local cafe or second Cup. Tim Hortons is owned by an American company.
Subway > Mr Sub
Shop local for clothes and shoes (but if you’re tall like me, there is much more work to do to find tall clothes online).
What I’m Trying Next
Youtube Premium for my Smart TV > https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube (for PC just use Firefox with ublock origins)
Play Books For Audio Books > Libby with a library card
Amazon > https://www.singingpebblebooks.ca/ for physical books
Diary Queen > A local ice cream parlour. I have one down the street from me I might try.
Google Docs > https://etherpad.org/
I paid a bout load of money to move my domain to a .ca address and move to a Canadian host that offers email services, I am moving all of my icloud stuff off to my new domain. It was 15 or so gb’s. I was paying for Apple’s hide my email so I am moving all those emails to my domain, it is not as easy to move as it was my data but I have less then 20 days left to do it. I tried setting up a self hosted bitwarden but I fell back to using 1Password, I was concerned with how much this will cost me again in 5 years when everything gets renewed but then I thought this is one lump sum that I will pay once every 5 years not little ones I pay every month or year and it will be cheaper in the long run.
I’m fortunate to have set up a domain with .ca many years ago, so that’s one less thing to worry about. LOL
I switched all my Google services to either self-host or Mailbox.org (Germany) back during covid.
I’m still using Bitwarden, but have looked at 1Password (Canadian, BTW), and I just really don’t want another subscription service and don’t feel comfortable self-hosting my password manager. I was using Keepass many years ago, and that might be another option for me.
My next big move will likely be to move away from Windows to Linux (attempt #50🤭 ) on at least one PC, but a handful of Windows-only apps really act as a barrier.
I use iOS as my daily driver, I have 3 different pi’s on my LAN to act as 2 piholes and 1 CUPS machine. I know I could have used one of my piholes to also work as the CUPS machine but when the pi5 was released it came with PCIe expansion so I could use a MVNe drive on them instead of my failing SD cards. Having a pihole setup on your network (don’t need two I just have one as a backup DNS server) is another way to stick it to the US, very little ad revenue is coming from me!
I left google, minus youtube, several years ago changing to iCloud+ the process of changing emails and figuring out what subscriptions I needed and which ones were just junk took months. So with my adoption of moving almost everything to Apple’s hide my email I had 150+ email addresses all being forwarded to my iCloud address over the years many were cancelled and deleted and what have you but it was done. So after all my data was moved to a virtual disk on my new host I started working on trying to install bitwarden to host my passwords, last night (early this morning whose to say) I was having so much difficulty trying to get it to install so I sheepishly signed up to an annual plan to 1Password and have been moving to it as I change email addresses.
The only online service I continue to pay for that is from the US is ChatGPT, only because it helps me proof read and format letters I send to politicians (It really helps me from calling them all “dumb fucks” or other words). Just to be clear I do not use ChatGPT to write these letters I do that myself. I have an old Mac Pro sitting in my office collecting dust; I have been thinking of booting it up and installing Linux on it, probably Debian because that is what my pi’s use, and installing ollama on it to replace the need for a ChatGPT account. My pi’s can handle helping me with my letters when I have ollama and a small model running on them but it is painfully slow and has difficulties helping me not curse out the Sask Party.
I have tried moving from the default apple apps but it is hard on my iPad and iPhone. Maybe once I am free of the iCloud+ stuff I will take another look at it. I have also been wanting to move away from my AppleTV hardware, I have all the hardware and I can get the (FOSS) things to do it but I just have not yet. One thing stopping me from moving away from actually cutting ties with the AppleTV is my smart home, as I write this I realize HomeAssistant is a thing that I can install on one or more of my pi’s. Yes more projects to take on to de-US-ify my home!
Take a look at selfhosting and a wireguard VPN. My whole digital life is local and the backups are encrypted before being uploaded to filen.io and box (lifetime 100Gb free). Photos and memories are backed up onto external drives and I hand them to my brother for safe keeping.
Backups are mandatory and a good system helps.
I have thought about it many times I have. I do prefer having my home backup, then off site back up I pay for so if something goes wrong I know who to yell at. I do need to think up a hard drive option though.