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.
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.
I have slowly but surely moved everything important off google. My main email is a proton mail now, and I changed my pixel for a oneplus :).
I’ve wanted to do this too for about a year but I see no benefit since most addresses I correspond with are unencrypted. One-way encryption is negligibly any better - unless I’m seriously misunderstanding Proton.
I’d switch to @iCloud.com but that just feels goofy.
It’s more about the ethics of the company hosting than any encryption benefits for me personally. Self-hosting would be ideal but email is a bit too important for me to do that personally, so I use proton as a compromise.
this, but also proton-to-proton emails are end-to-end encrypted by default. see here for more info. supporting security-by-default is super important to me.
your email is quite literally an advert. almost every time someone sees my emails end in @tuta.io or @aleeas.com, they ask me about it. when all emails use a google or a microsoft domain it reinforces this oligarchy.
So um…how do I show the lemmyverse that this is a really important post without the shiny meaningless gold coin?
Upvote i guess ❤️🍓
Interact, share. Be positive.
idk. Try writing a poem?
Yes. But remember to share!
🪙🪙
As far as my PCs, I use a subscription service for email (
fastmail.com). I’m still using the Chrome browser, but at some point I may have to go to Firefox for the sake of my uBlock Origin extension which I rely on heavily. Functionality of that extension may be reduced at some point by the forced migration to Google’s new extension platform (Manifest V3).I have to have to have a Google account for my Android phone. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get away from that. I mean you have two choices with phones, Android or iOS. I’m not going anywhere near Apple so Android is it. I’ve audited all my privacy settings in my Google account to minimize personal data, whether they actually honor those settings or not, who knows.
Graphene os is a privacy based android operating system. They run containerized google instances, and severely restrict their view.
If you buy/finance your phone through your carrier, you’re almost guaranteed to have a locked down bootloader. Also, and I’m unable to find the article at the moment, but apparently larger banks are forcing google to inhibit users’ ability to root their phones in the name of security.
I typically get unlocked phones because of that. I hadn’t heard about the banks, but they are typically ok as long as they are unlocked and paid for upfront.
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.
i can see on your profile that you’re 17, you’re awesome for taking these things seriously so young. it gets a chuckle sometimes when people see no google apps on my phone, or a different search engine when i look something up. if you hear any laughs, just know you’re on the right side of history :p
These past few weeks I’ve really been getting more and more into programming and online security. I reckon I will learn a lot from this community, and Lemmy in general. The whole Reddit migration thing already taught me plenty about how a corporate app can drive away its users. It feels good to let Google go, and here is to learning more about everything federated and decentralised!
idk if you’re familiar with the ‘reddit hack’ when making searches online. basically, you add ‘reddit’ to the end of your search and you’ll get a list of reddit posts discussing the thing you’re looking for.
i want a ‘lemmy hack’ to replace this, ending a search with ‘site:beehaw.org’ or ‘site:lemmy.world’.
this only works if people ask questions for people to answer, so please make posts if you have any questions during your privacy journey. you’ll be building the foundations for lemmy to fill the void reddit once did :)
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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 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-dominated environment.
The biggest thing I de-Googled was gmail. I had my own domain already so it wasn’t tough to move (to my web hosting provider’s included email service).
I switched to Firefox+uBO from Chrome.
They de-Googled RSS for me (now on Newsblur).
Things I still use:
- Drive for backups (but have a local backup in case their AI bans me)
- YouTube Premium (I hate ads)
- Contacts (Cardbook addon for Thunderbird works well with this)
- Calendar (Thunderbird supports natively)
- Keep (Shared shopping list)
- Pixel phone (I don’t really care for Apple, either)
DuckDuckGo got a shoutout from Star Trek: Strange New Worlds this week. Much smoother than Hawaii Five-Oh’s “Bing it.”
I do not have a Google account, so no Gmail address, I do not use Play Store, and I do not use YouTube website.
I moved off a while ago at this point… I still have to use some of it because of work being on G-Suites but otherwise my personal stuff has moved.
- Email: Hey & ProtonMail
- Storage: Dropbox
- Notes: SimpleNotes & Obsidian.md
- Chat: Telegram & Matrix/Element
- 2FA: ProtonPass (as of yesterday, Authy before that)
- Passwords: 1Password
- Other: Apple stuff mostly
How is the proton pass 2FA? I saw they have that it haven’t gotten around to switching from Authy yet.
Not including work, except for indirectly watching YouTube (i.e. through invidious and other frontends), I am 100% degoogled.
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
Currently the only Google services I use are accessed through open-source third-party implementations - in particular, Aurora Store, NewPipe, and SmartTubeNext! That said, nowadays I only use YouTube regularly and sometimes access their play store’s servers on the rare occasion that I actually need to install/update a proprietary application.
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.
Only apps by Google I use are gboard, gmail and translator. If someone knows well designed alternatives please share.
Fastmail is fantastic from a user experience perspective, though depending on your privacy demands it may not pass the test.
Long time Fastmail user here. Where is it failing with respect to privacy?
Nobody has mentioned a translator alternative so I would recommend DeepL, though what they collect for data I don’t entirely know so go with caution
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