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.
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.
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
I used to rely almost exclusively on Google for almost anything online. Fortunately, I’m much less dependent on Google and their services now. I’m even self-hosting some of my own services nowadays!
- Search engine: Ecosia and DuckDuckGo
- E-mail: Protonmail
- File storage: Nextcloud (selfhosted)
- Online Office Suite: Nextcloud Office (selfhosted)
- Maps: OpenStreetMaps
- 2FA App: Aegis
- Translator: DeepL
- Notes and Tasks: Obsidian.md
- Calendar: An actual wall calendar :)
Every single one of these apps/services used to be provided by google, so I think it’s safe to say I’ve come a long way!
Of course, things could be better. I still use Google Contacts for synchronizing my, hum, contacts. I also use YouTube quite a bit, but as a paying customer my experience with it is just fine. I also use gboard on my phone — for bilingual speakers there’s just no good alternative, imho. And, finally, I download/update most of my phone apps through Google Play.
How do you host nextcloud? At home or on a vps?
Did you have any self hosting experience before doing that?
Do you know Logseq? It’s an OpenSource/FOSS alternative to obsidian
How do you host nextcloud? At home or on a vps?
On a VPS. Later down the road I intend to build my own home server, but that will take some time and money. A VPS is not ideal, but that’s leagues above trusting Google and the likes, and so far it has been working well enough for me.
Did you have any self hosting experience before doing that?
None at all.
Do you know Logseq? It’s an OpenSource/FOSS alternative to obsidian
I did try it, and it’s a cool project, but not as good as Obsidian, imho.
Thanks for the reply. How did you learn about self hosting nextcloud? May I ask what’s the pricetag for a vps for nextcloud? Are you using a preconfigured is from nextcloud?
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.
Deleting the old email account that fast is a bit risky. I still have my old yahoo account after switching to posteo two years ago and still sometimes get mails to it.
