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.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    12
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year 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 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.

    • PR_freak@vlemmy.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      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

      • dtc@lemmy.pt
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

      • aeternum@kbin.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        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)

      • thayer@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • kostel_thecreed@lemmy.ca
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          1 year ago

          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.

          • thayer@lemmy.ca
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            0
            ·
            1 year ago

            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).

            • kostel_thecreed@lemmy.ca
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              0
              ·
              1 year ago

              Wow, surprising really, might just have to try it and set it up tomorrow! Thank you, hope it works out for me lol.

              • thayer@lemmy.ca
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                1 year ago

                No problem! Just a couple of tips…

                1. 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

                2. 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!