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 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.
How has a self hosted imap been treating you?
I heard some pretty brutal stories, like big email providers just refusing emails from self hosted servers
I self-host my own mail server. I don’t send many emails, but they seem to be arriving correctly whenever I do at the moment, but it wasn’t always like this. I’ve properly setup SPF, DKIM and DMARC, which helps a lot, but my IP address was blacklisted on some servers from a previous owner I guess. I have a VPS from OVH. I had to manually fill out some forms to get Microsoft Outlook to accept emails from my server. Despite that, it has been working flawlessly. I have my own domain since 2017, and I’d say the age of the domain is also important.
Not OP, but I used to self host email. I gave up because both google and microsoft, the two big players in email, refused to deliver my mail to anywhere but spam/junk. I had DKIM, SPF and DMARC set up, with reverse DNS set up correctly. So I gave up. Now I use a privacy friendly email provider (paid)
How do you use syncthing for storage? Kinda confused.
Hah, that’s a fair question! We use syncthing in place of cloud storage.
We have several 1-way and 2-way shares configured across about 10 devices. Our camera rolls are synced to the home file server while we’re on the road, thus eliminating the need for Google Photos. It also keeps our shared KeePass database in sync between all clients, syncs wallpapers across desktops, etc. It’s excellent software and I really can’t say enough good things about the project.
It’s no replacement for actual backups, which I do perform monthly with copies stored off-site, but it can be a great solution for those wanting to move away from Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.
Ahh okay thanks for the explanation. The way you use it seems alot easier and concise than what I thought you used it as, specially the central home server part. Have you experienced any corruptions or loss of data using your method? That’s the main concern I have with programs that sync, like syncthing.
We’ve been using it across many devices for several years now and haven’t had any data loss or corruption. It handles 2-way conflicts very well, creating duplicate files that allow you to compare and merge when necessary.
This has only happened with our KeePass database, which is shared across all of the devices, and even then it was only when two of us modified the db within just a few minutes of each other (rare).
Wow, surprising really, might just have to try it and set it up tomorrow! Thank you, hope it works out for me lol.
No problem! Just a couple of tips…
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It will create a default share upon installation; you can just delete this and create a new share for whatever/wherever you actually want it to be
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Don’t try to nest your shares (e.g. don’t create a share in a subfolder of another share). I think Syncthing prevents this now, but in the past it would let you do it and it caused issues due to recursion.
Try to think about a logical structure of your shares that will make the most sense for your use case. If you’re only syncing one folder, this won’t be an issue, but if you have lots of clients with various shares, you’ll need to consider how those folders are structured on the devices so that they don’t overlap.
If you have any questions, feel free to shoot me a msg or post to one of the selfhosted communities. Good luck!
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I have to just be sure that you at least know about demicrosofted VS Code, VS Codium
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
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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…
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Working on it
Had to give them some money for a Pixel 7, at least it was half off plus a trade-in on the old phone Installed GrapheneOS a couple of days agoI’ve degoogled my life as much as I can, but it’s almost impossible to completely ditch Google Maps, YouTube, and Android. So I’m not even sure I’ve done anything significant, because I assume they get pretty much everything from my phone.
- Magic Earth for maps
- NewPipe for Youtube
- Android with no Google account & FDriod + Aurora Store
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i think you’d get a lot of value from searxNG. it’s a customisable search engine that queries results from dozens of search engines, and you have full control over which results you see. you want google results AND ddg results? that’s awesome. but you just want yandex results for image searches? that’s fine too!
i personally use https://search.bus-hit.me/, but you can find more here.
You can even self-host SearX (ng) if you want complete control over your data!
The problem is that I’m pretty sure that spammers are specifically targeting Google with a lot of their effort because of the size of its userbase.
So DDG or whoever else can be a solution for some, but if they get a big enough userbase, the SEO dollars are going to go towards hitting them too. Leveraging smaller size can’t be a fix for everyone.
Kinda like Reddit and the Fediverse. Right now – and in the past – there’s a limited amount of money in trying to jam spam in front of the userbase’s eyeballs on lemmy and kbin. But whenever the userbase grows by a factor of ten, so does the return-on-investment to a spammer in gaming their system. If the entire Reddit userbase collectively moved here tomorrow, the spammers would very quickly follow.
Basically degoogled except YouTube because content creators are on that platform. Also occasionally needs to use Google search because DDG sometimes doesn’t work.
100% degoogled. Everything is selfhosted, except for Telegram. Even at job :)
Just switched from Google photos to photoprism. It’s pretty awesome! It only took 8 hours to index and label my 17500~ photos (not including the week and a half Google Takeout took). That was the big one for me. Not I am slowly working through all my other google/centralized services and seeing if there are self hosted or decentralized alternatives.
Crying because I’m sitting on 30k+ photos and videos on Google Photos and staring down the monumental task of backing them up piecemeal.
I’ve been wanting to switch to PhotoPrism for a while. Is face/object detection any good, compared to Google Photos? Do you need powerful specs, or can a low-spec machine handle it?
Ooh, I’ll have to look into photoprism. Thank you!
Pixelfed is a federated decentralized image and video host you might look into.
Thanks for letting me know this exists, but I don’t think it’s really something I’m looking for.
Proton’s services, Cryptomator, Invideous, GrapheneOS, a handful of apps from f-droid.
Also, quick plug - !privacyguides@lemmy.one is the official Privacy Guides community on Lemmy!
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 tools 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.
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.
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 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 :).
Changing from a Pixel to another Android phone is hardly degoogling, if anything it’s just inviting in another pair of eyes! Ironically the best way to degoogle on Android is with a Pixel running GrapheneOS!
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.
Not including work, except for indirectly watching YouTube (i.e. through invidious and other frontends), I am 100% degoogled.
