Gmail is an email service. Like the fediverse, email is federated.
By changing your email provider, do you really lose anything? You can still contact your friends, contacts and even various customer suports. You also can recieve emails from popular social media apps. If you degoogle from atleast one Google app, maybe Gmail could be the easiest and least life changing one.
While, Youtube could easilly be one of the most difficult to degoogle from. Not like literally but emotionally. Like deep down you know you can find mostly all you might need on something like Peertube but not all the entertainment media like on Youtube. You will also become a social outcast if peertube is the only app you use. You might not understand channels people mention in day to day talk from youtube or references.
If you use exclusively fediverse apps and sites, Chrome could be almost just as easy to replace as gmail, longterm. However If you use Youtube it won’t surprise me that Youtube downgrades your performance and user experience in what ever means neccesary on competing browsers.
Completely disagree.
I’ve had my Gmail for so long, I literally would not be able to dump it. Records, logins, accounts etc., all tied to my Gmail.
My phone, government accounts, lawyers, medical and tax are all tied to that account. It’s more than just sending a new email address for friends to contact you with.
On the other hand, YouTube is…social media? You don’t have to watch videos on line. I think I’ve used my YouTube account 5 times in my life, and I’m not a social pariah.
To be honest, it’s probably a generational thing. No one I know really uses YouTube, and they all have their life tied to their Gmail account.
If you have a deep history with gmail then that could make it harder to to replace. It’s very true especially if from important positions you participated in, along with multiple accounts on it which I like to call leaving eggs all in one basket since they are all reliant on that account.
For people who arent quiet as invested in that, and just use it casually which is a pretty big percent could easily replace gmail with nothing to lose and those are the type of users I was thinking about when writing up this post. But I can agree with what you are saying here and that you have a good point.
I can see it from both sides. My gmail accounts (regular and throwaway) were roughly my fourth generation email addresses. I got my first email address in 1990. It was tied directly to an educational institution. When I switched institutions, I switched email addresses, and around that time got an ISP email address as well. Non-educational emails went to my ISP address and anything educational related went to my new edu address; everyone in edu circles knew to switch addresses because my .plan file associated with my old account advised them it was closed and what my new one was.
Eventually, I realized that neither my ISP nor edu institution would be with me forever, so I switched everything over to an email redirect service with Yahoo and Hotmail throwaway addresses for stuff that needed an account that was neither professional nor personal.
Then along came Google, Yahoo imploded, Hotmail got bought by Microsoft, and my email redirect service went out of business as the dot com bubble burst.
Oh, and I changed jobs which required moving which meant switching ISPs.
So GMail was a lifeline because I set all my other accounts to both forward to gmail AND set autoresponders informing the sender of my new address.
Of course, that happened 19 years ago. Back then, there were no SMS authentications, no real life accounts tied irrevocably to an email address. My eBay and PayPal accounts just needed an address update, and pretty much everyone else hadn’t got to the point where email address was even an option on a registration form.
That said, I recently did some email address shuffling, and all the accounts that really matter got switched relatively painlessly; I have a password manager, and part of changing addresses involves going through every entry in my password manager (which is already helpfully divided into personal, professional and throwaway) to update addresses as appropriate.
Everyone else gets the same autorespond and redirect treatment for a year. After that, anyone I’ve missed will have to locate me via someone else.
Of course, I’ve also maintained a PGP key since 1993 that has my chain of email addresses associated with it, so anyone who knows my key can just look up my current email address. It’s really the only thing I use that key for anymore. But there’s a very limited set of people that would even think to look me up by PGP, or even save a copy of my public key and remember the key exchange I use.
I had a similar history but I went through the process anyway. Got my own domain and used Fastmail for hosting. I like their masked email address feature. It’s taken months but I went through one by one and changed all my important email addresses. There are a few that can’t be changed though, and some services that I signed up with using my google account also can’t be changed. It was still worth it. Calendar isn’t a big deal to change either. I forwarded all my email to Fastmail and also subscribed to my google calendars to make the transition easier.
Yeah Gmail is the hardest. Just for the sheer amount of logins. Been with it was an invite only beta in like 2005. I got a paid proton account but it’s hard to shake it because I’m constantly needing to log back in with it.
You can configure your Gmail account to forward your emails to Proton. It’s under the “Forwarding” tab in the settings. You need to login once in a while to keep the account alive, but if you use any other Google service that’s easy.
I’ve been using fastmail for a few months now. Besides being a really top-notch replacement for gmail and even adding a few features, it also onboards you by giving you a couple quick fields to fill out and then immediately imports everything you had in gmail. And then it keeps importing it, continuously, as long as you want.
It’s not like i’m paying for gmail, so I’ll keep the account alive as long as I need while I switch all the same accounts and records that you are (validly) mentioning as a barrier. I could actually do most of it in one sweep, if I just searched for my old email address in 1password, but it’s not really that time-sensitive to switch, and in the meantime I get to use fastmail.
You can configure your Gmail account to forward emails to your new account and then update your contact information gradually. That’s what I did when I moved out years ago and I know it’s still working, because now and then my Gmail account still receives some spam that Google helpfully forwards to me.
I went through switching recently. Anytime you log in somewhere I would change the email of that account, and integrate it i to a password manager while being at it.
Bit by bit you become more independant from Gmail.
As a bonus I also started using a service like AddyMail or SimpleLogin, so that I have different emails for different accounts. Quite easy to use.
Don’t think it’s generational. I’ve had a gmail account for about 15 years, and use youtube a lot, and I’m in my 50s. I watch a lot of repair, will it start, restoration and motorbike videos - there’s some amazing content on there, far better than anything available on my tv. And as an educational tool - need to repair something in your home, or change the brakes on your car? Within seconds you have multiple instructional videos of real people actually showing you how to do that exact thing - the world’s never known such a thing.
I mean… it’s a process? I have a yahoo and a gmail account and I’ve switched like 95% of my stuff away from them to iCloud at this point. It just takes time and patience. As for logins, grab BitWarden and start using it to store passwords instead. Has the side benefit of letting you generate all randomized passwords as you switch to mail-based logins so theres no password duplication or patterns for anyone to analyze if a few different places lose your account credentials.
Use mail forwarding and a password manager, now it doesn’t matter if your accounts are on an old gmail, you can switch services any time.
Not really achieving a degoogle that way though, they’re still getting all their tracking data
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