I’m writing a book and my editor needs to be able to alter/comment on the document as we go. I’m afraid AI is gonna use my work so I wanna move away from Google.
There’s an app called “Notebooks” available in Moss
It’s free, open-source and online, but must run as an app and is still in Beta.
https://european-alternatives.eu/
In general this is a great resource for finding alternatives, obviously with a European bias. But many are FOSS as well
i see many comments here suggesting other paid proprietary tools and just want to add that you should please consider exclusively FOSS solutions. replacing google with another company saying: “trust me, bro”, just does not cut it anymore. the internet is filled with stories of professionals losing work, because insert big tech company suspended their accounts, trains their AI without disclosure or just leaked your credentials and apologizes by makung a whoopsie post and suggesting you just change your password.
the more open, local and established your setup is, the less you are going to have those headaches and can focus on actually working, even if it means a little more hurdles with setup and less flashy features.
don’t be a sheep
Venn diagram of free as in beer and Foss webservice… It would have to be someone with large budget who wants to do good in the world. And also isn’t worried about legal liability for their services.
Even catbox.moe isn’t foss.
There are some good examples ITT though, like etherpad.
it “just” has to be someone with a good idea they are passionate about. you think of only hosted services, but there is also the option of a normal file, syncthing sended back and forth aside from selfhosted options such as collabora just asan example.
wdym even catbox? this is just a filehoster…
I was trying to think of popular free services, and even catbox isn’t FOSS. But it seems like it would be since it is so cool.
https://etherpad.org/ lets you set up your own instance or sign up to free existing instances for online document collaboration. It seems very on par with Google Docs.
https://www.collaboraonline.com/collabora-online/ has wide document format compatibility and is most comparable to M$ 360, but you need to sign up for a free demo and I don’t know how long that lasts or what it costs afterwards.
https://cryptpad.fr/ This is the one I’ve personally used the most without ever creating an account. It uses OnlyOffice, is e2ee, easy to create and share. Without an account, your document is deleted after 90 days. With a free account, you get 1GB of storage and the ability to share folders and collaborate with other users.
The safest option is always just work in the offline editor of your choice and send it back and forth securely with edits or comments. Keep each revision saved separately so you can go back if needed.
Good luck with your book!
FYI, OnlyOffice is entirely Russian-owned, through a holding company in Singapore and a subsidiary in Latvia. I don’t know if money you give CryptPad ends up in Russian hands, but OnlyOffice put a lot of effort into obscuring this.
The OnlyOffice software itself is Open Source. So unless you’re using their online hosting options as well, it’s irrelevant. Murena, for example, uses OnlyOffice as their “Google Office” equivalent, but they have it self hosted on their own servers (German I believe). Does Murena pay them for a hosting license as per their business pricing document? Sure…probably. But that doesn’t mean that your data with Murena is going to Russia or anything like that.
I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m just saying a distinction has to be made between the OnlyOffice hosting services and the OnlyOffice actual software
Murena Workspace makes use of Nextcloud and OnlyOffice for their e/os phones. But you don’t need to use e/is to sign up for workspace.
I’m afraid AI is gonna use my work so I wanna move away from Google.
That is a completely valid fear, from what I understand of how Google operates.
I no longer trust Google with anything.
cryptpad All your docs are stored encrypted, so no AI can be trained on.
Amazed that I didn’t see any references to OpenDesk. Specifically built on open-source to escape foreign government and/or corpo malfeasance.
Can be self hosted with k8s. https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk/deployment/opendesk
Obsidian/any competent editor + sync thing + backup.
I haven’t had any issues with this setup. The syncing is almost instant.
Depending on the nature of your needs wrt version control, and how you want your editor to provide annotations, that will shape what solutions work for you. Those are pretty important considerations you will probably want to clarify, to get good advice. Also your comfort with self-hosting.
I’ve personally switched to silverbullet. It offers some really cool features, but I don’t think it’s going to provide the things you want in a way I suspect you’d like.
For example, annotations would be directly inline, not in a little sidebar. And there is no versioning to tell you who made what edit, when; you have to self host it, and provide your own backups at whatever schedule you want, separately from the app. And the really cool features probably aren’t going to be useful for the manuscript itself, it’s things like smart linking to sections of pages, and the ability to embed search queries of your docs directly in a page.Proton for a “drop in” kind of replacement, although there are some format shenanigans iirc. Nextcloud should work fine, and you can have it hosted on their servers or host yourself
Is there a personal Nextcloud option? It looks like it’s all for official businesses
You have to host it yourself, pay for it to be hosted for you, or know and trust someone with an instance who is willing to give you an account.
Nextcloud is like Lemmy. Nextcloud is just the software, to use it you need a service provider that’ll give you an actual instance to sign up on. That provider can be anyone, including yourself.
Nextcloud makes free personal accounts available via a couple partners, here: https://nextcloud.com/sign-up/
Ah. Yeah that’s not a feasible thing for us unfortunately. My editor is part of a small startup publishing company, so their revenue is pretty much non-existent right now.
I edited my comment.
But if a couple gigs of storage will do, there is this: https://nextcloud.com/sign-up/
It’s the same thing, you can host it yourself or let someone host it for you. But you’re right with your feeling that they don’t really prioritize a slim profile for selfhosters with this system. I had to give it up and move to some more lightweight alternatives for those parts I’m using.
Proton is probably the easiest—their free tier might even be enough for your use case.
Dropbox?
Idk how I didn’t think of that, my goodness
I’d carefully review policies of Dropbox or any company to make sure you aren’t just jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. If I was you I’d look into one of the encrypted services others have mentioned. Or even just email an encrypted PDF to them on the regular.
I’m going to review my options EXTENSIVELY. My book is the best thing I’ve ever written and my beta readers are already fans of it and I’m only 3 chapters in.
This sounds really exciting. Can’t wait to hear more about your book.
Thank you! I plan to share it here on Lemmy once I get published. I’m having so much fun with it. It’s SUPER different than my usual writing an it is honestly a blast
Seriously. Share a link to it when it’s ready.
I will! I’m hoping to have it done within a year. I’m fast tracked for publishing because my cousin is my editor in the startup publishing company I’m going through and we devised a chapter by chapter editing process that makes the whole thing quicker. Also nepotism lmao.
I also manage to write every day, whether it be just a single sentence, a paragraph, or a whole lot more. I wfh full time, which gives me loads of free time to work on stuff while somehow being hella productive for my day job lol.
I have little side projects (fanfics. Pls don’t judge me too hard lmao) to practice my craft with established lore and characters. It allows me to experiment with imagery and dialogue.
Now I want to read the book!
I’ll def post about it once it’s done! Rn only my inner circle of irl buddies and my editor are reading it.
I see many great suggestions here so I am only gonna add one thing to them: consider self hosting if you care about privacy and owning your own work. Something like nextcloud has all of the features of google drive/docs built in and much more and these days really isn’t that hard to expensive to setup.
I am def getting into self hosting. My biodad actually got me a raspberry pi for xmas so I can start learning Linux so I can start self hosting a bunch of shit
sounds like a great start :D one day that raspberry is gonna be your tv’s brain instead of a little server and you’ll look back with tears in your eyes and proceed to play a movie on it streaming from a huge server that cost you way more then you’d ever admit to anyone…
Self hosting is a fun hobby. I set Nextcloud up for myself and love it! If you’re just getting in, I would look at a “NUC”-like mini pc to run services on. They are a bit more expensive, but you get better performance.
