We’re reaching the end of an era wherein billions of dollars of investor money was shovelled into tech startups to build large user-bases, and now those companies (now monoliths) are beginning to constrict their user-bases and squeeze for every single penny they can possibly extract. Fair or not.

Now more than ever, it’s important for us to step back and reconsider whether we want to be billboards for these companies anymore.

For anyone unfamiliar, some good resources to have when starting your degoogling journey are below:

Privacy Guides - A list of privacy-respecting services you can use.

Plexus - A crowdsourced information bank of service compatibility with degoogled devices.

This random PDF - A study from 2018 detailing data that Google tracks about its’ users.

  • thayer@lemmy.caEnglish
    3·
    2 years ago

    It’s been a long time in the making, but I’ve finally degoogled and largely removed all proprietary software from my personal life. I know this topic is pretty well covered here and elsewhere so just to add to the list of others, here’s where I’m at these days:

    • OS: Fedora (Silverblue) Linux (w/ AMD Radeon GPU)
    • Email: Thunderbird w/ hosted email over IMAP
    • Calendar/Contacts: Radicale instance w/ DAVx⁵ on Android
    • Storage: Syncthing
    • Web: Firefox
    • Search: Startpage and DuckDuckGo mostly, but still use Google and Bing on occasion
    • IM: Signal
    • Desktop productivity: LibreOffice when I need it (Collabora Office on Android)
    • Notes: Vim, VS Code (Markor on Android); most of my “docs” are just plain text files written in markdown
    • Passwords: KeepassXC/DX
    • Code editor: Vim, VS Code
    • GrapheneOS on mobile, with almost entirely FOSS apps
    • Kindle e-book reader with management via Calibre
    • Media managed by Kodi with a raspberry pi
    • Proxmox hypervisor for Windows/Linux VMs and containers

    Gaming under Linux has improved unbelievably these past few years, now that Steam is contributing with their Steam Deck platform. I used to have to dual-boot Windows to keep up with the latest titles, but I wiped it about a year ago and things have been great.

    I still rely on Microsoft Excel and Adobe Photoshop for some tasks, but less so now than ever before. Unfortunately, my work will always be a Windows-only environment.

  • Queen HawlSera@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    2 years ago

    I deleted my google drive content so they can’t arbitrarily decide something I wrote is worth banning my account over or use it to train their AIs, I made a backup, obviously.

    Even though my content is safe, deleting it off of Google’s servers felt like drowning my own children in a bathtub

  • thaedrus@beehaw.orgEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    I have started to degoogle bits and pieces. I self-host the majority of the services I need and really enjoyed the journey so far since I learned so much. I am approaching the stage in my life where I have less time to spend on personal hobbies so I fear this path may not be sustainable. In my opinions here are the pros and cons.

    Pros:

    • Full control of my data
    • Pick the ideal tool from the open source community
    • Learning experience
    • Engagement with community

    Cons:

    • Technical knowledge needed to setup and maintain self-hosted tools
    • Self-hosted environments have security risks (best to put everything behind VPN)
    • Disparate tools don’t connect together (requires additional automation configuration)
    • Additional costs for services including and not limited to: domain name, email, backup storage, self-host server hardware, VPN, and donations to devs
    • Higher personal downtime due to lacking features, server and service maintenance
    • Time sink to learn, research, general devops of tools, maintenance of server

    Key services to name a few:

    • File storage - Nextcloud
    • File sync - Syncthing
    • Office - Nextcloud + Collabora
    • Email - Mailfence
    • Photos - Photoprism

    So far there are more negatives than positives, but the positives still outweigh negatives. I do have to say degoogling is getting easier than before.

    • jcarax@beehaw.orgEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      What are you using for syncing and viewing your photos? I ended up with a mailbox.org account, because I really want my contacts to be synced to the OS on my phone. So right now I just upload them to my cloud drive there, but I need to at least automate it. I might end up using the OX Drive app that mailbox.org recommends, or I might end up using syncthing to sync locally, and then push them up to the mailbox.org drive using webdav.

      I’m just using Simple Gallery on my phone for now, not sure where I’ll end up on my laptop once I finish switching off the Apple ecosystem back to a Thinkpad running Linux. I’ve been looking at Piwigo and PhotoPrism a bit, but haven’t given them a try yet. PhotoPrism has webdav support, so it’s especially intriguing.

      On the other hand, I might switch to Proton Mail in 10-20 years when they implement the promised contact sync to the OS. Or even better, if Tutanota does it. But I guess if I use webdav, it leaves me pretty open to spin up a server somewhere for photos and other files. I’ve already been thinking about getting a Baikal server going for VJOURNAL support, to run jtxtasks, not that Baikal supports webdav…

  • Logan@beehaw.orgEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    I deleted my Google accounts today and made a Proton email to replace my previous emails with. I’m now using Firefox and DDG, and it honestly feels much fresher now. I’m happy to finally be exploring alternatives to Google and learning about online security and integrity.

  • pandaontoast@beehaw.orgEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    The only thing I still hold onto my account for is YouTube. I pay for mailbox.org which covers email, calendar and cloud stuff. Their website could be better but the service is quality and their privacy policy is tight. When I was on android I used a bunch of custom roms with microg. My favourite ended up being calyxos but they all had a little jank here or there. I dearly miss NewPipe for android as a replacement for the official youtube app.

    Edit: I also pay for Kagi for search. The price is a bit steep but I have found it justifiable in terms of the value I get from it. Whoogle and Searx are good options too