How much of your life have you degoogled?
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:
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.
I have to just be sure that you at least know about demicrosofted VS Code, VS Codium
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...
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
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!
So um…how do I show the lemmyverse that this is a really important post without the shiny meaningless gold coin?
Interact, share. Be positive.
idk. Try writing a poem?
Yes. But remember to share!
I can write poetry, so I asked a new friend:
🪙🪙
Upvote i guess ❤️🍓
Outside of work I’ve degoogled with the exception of google calendar (shared family google calendar so that would need to bring everyone along with me!) and unfortunately the google Wi-Fi/nests.
I would like to swap out the google Wi-Fi but it just seems like such a lot of money to waste and they are working at the moment for the mesh Wi-Fi. I’ve just made sure to disable and opt out to as many of the google analytic tracking as possible.
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.
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!
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 :)
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!
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
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.
None at all.
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 used this guide: https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one/blob/main/reverse-proxy.md
I also had the help of a webdev friend of mine, that taught me the basics of how to setup and use Docker.
I hired my VPS for around $200 a year (after comverting from Brazilian Reais to American Dollars). It gives me a VPS with 2 vcores, 2GB RAM and 40 GB SSD. There are many VPS providers that can offer you somthing with similar specs and and prices, like Hostinger, AWS and the likes. (Depending on where you live, you may actually find much better prices)
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.
How is the proton pass 2FA? I saw they have that it haven't gotten around to switching from Authy yet.
Any particular reason for switching away from authy?
i'm not a cybersecurity expert so i can't say anything about how well they secure your data. however, authy is closed source and a walled garden. you can't easily export your data. if authy pulls a reddit tomorrow and decides to start charging, you're screwed.
building your 2fa life in a different service like aegis will save you so much headache in the future, and you can feel good about supporting open source.
Basically degoogled except YouTube because content creators are on that platform. Also occasionally needs to use Google search because DDG sometimes doesn't work.
You might want to check invidous, it's a youtube frontend you can use to browse youtube anonymously.
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:
Cons:
Key services to name a few:
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.
100% degoogled. Everything is selfhosted, except for Telegram. Even at job :)
I'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.
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 ago
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 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.
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
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 on Chrome may be reduced at some point by the forced migration to Google's new extension platform (Manifest V3).I 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.
You dont need a google account to run an android phone. Look in to Fdroid and Aurora store. You can disable, although not remove, a lot of the google services too. It's not perfect de googleing as they still track you through hidden built in services like the one that the phone uses to check it's online.
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.
It's not so much any of that, I think it had to do with fears of people unlocking services that carriers can charge fees for (ie mobile hotspot). Banks were worried about people somehow hacking their systems or compromising security. It all had to do with SafetyNet hardware attestation, and that Google was under increased pressure from the finance industry to guarantee software security (and in the process make rooting devices or using unauthorized ROMs damn near impossible), but I still can't for the life of me find the article.
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:
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've been running my own Nextcloud instance since 2020, which, combined with ProtonMail, has replaced basically everything I was using Google/Microsoft for
Didn't realize you could host your own, that's good to know
Google still runs a good chunk of my life and some of it I know I could use some of the great alternatives that others have mentioned but some of it I'm not really sure about.
Namely:
Maps
Messenger (web browser access to my texts)
Contact sync and backup
Google voice
And all the various services that let my phone operate...
Right, I can't use my phone without it and I'm not buying into Apple. I also really like the user reviews on Maps, it's like Yelp and TripAdvisor before they both fell to enshttification. I've also got a Voice number that I pay nothing for and I give it out when businesses demand a phone number. I don't see myself switching to anything else for those.
I was thinking about it; Google offers a number of useful services, and I realise the hardest to get out of will be Maps. I can sort of replace the others with workarounds (Photos will probably be the second hardest to move from), but Maps, there's nothing good enough to replace it for me as far as I can tell.
For Maps there's an alternative on FDroid called GMaps WV which is actually just the Google Maps website wrapped in a tiny webview app. It can't spy on you if you run it that way.
Or you can install Hermit and add Google Maps as one of its sandboxed light apps.
If you're interested in things that aren't Google Maps you can look at OSMAnd, a great app with tons of features and my go-to app when traveling because you can download offline maps and info about local stores, restaurants, attractions etc.
On the lightweight side there's Map Marker which can use map tiles from a dozen different map services, and you can place markers on the map and group them in collections.
LineageOS for microg: degoogled android. DuckDuckGo: search. Firefox: web browser. Ublock origin: ad blocker. Proton: email. OsmAnd+: maps.
Only google product I still use is youtube, but I have made some efforts here:
On desktop pc I use firefox with sponserblock and ublock origin to hide ads and automatically skip sponsered content. I also have an addon called unhook, which hides recommendations, 'people also watched' etc.
I also use and recommend Odysee as a youtube alternative.
On my TV I use SmartTubeNext, on my phone I use revanced.
I host my own music server with navidrome (and my own video media server with Jellyfin). But when I dont have access to that, I also use ViMusic as a youtube music replacement for (degoogled) android.
Can absolutely recommend any and all of the tools I listed.
I degoogled by switching to an iPhone 😅 DuckDuckGo is my default search engine.
That is a sacrifice I'm not willing to make. Yikes!
I'd argue that Apple is the lesser evil when it comes to privacy 😁
Tried DDG a few times over the years. Sorry, but it just doesn't do it for me. Results were terrible. Google had lots of results and it was just too much effort to keep switching from DDG if it doesn't provide an answer. Because I know Google will.
I have been using DDG as default for probably two years now. I love how I get so few ads and a cleaner experience as well. I absolutely agree Google has better results sometimes and I just use !g at the start of my search to get purely Google results. The search operators are amazing and there are so many!
pretty effectively!
I use a Searx instance for searching (with the engine it uses set to DDG), Tutanota for email and Piped/Invidious and Libretube for videos. meanwhile on both my phone and tablet I've used ADB to purge all of Google's malware, and Play Services is outright disabled on my tablet lmao (and contrary to what one might think, the only thing it impacts is I don't get app notifications)
and then I use Aurora Store to update Twitch and Discord, and I use alternatives from F-Droid for stuff like the calendar
Only apps by Google I use are gboard, gmail and translator. If someone knows well designed alternatives please share.
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
If swipe typing is your thing, take a look at anysoft keyboard (but be prepared to do a lot of menu diving!)
You can use a privacy-respecting mail service and use any mail app you want with it. K9 Mail app is pretty well regarded, and there's no shortage of decent mail services, some suggestions:
https://european-alternatives.eu/category/email-providers
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?
Love Fastmail! I used Protonmail for a while but their development is soooo slow and they never seem to be able to deliver things on time. Promising features that are years late.
Proton is awesome. Yeah they are a bit slow with new features but they've been rolling out quite a bit recently. In the last few years we've got VPN, calendar, drive and proton pass. They even upgraded my premium account to Proton Unlimited (which gets like >500 GB storage) for free for no apparent reason other than a 'thank you'.
The big one I was waiting for was Proton Drive, as Google drive was the last Google service I was really using, so the free storage upgrade was just the icing on the cake.
I'd use Proton pass too, but I'm already paying for Bitwarden family account and am pretty happy with that.
FlorisBoard keyboard is the one to watch as the Gboard killer. v0.40 will finally bring word suggestions and inline autocorrect. In all other respects, it's more customizable than Gboard and can be configured to match the exact size/layout.
For email, K-9 Mail (soon to be Thunderbird Mobile) has made a lot of progress in modernizing its UI this year now that Mozilla has partnered up with the main dev, cketti.
DuckDuckGo got a shoutout from Star Trek: Strange New Worlds this week. Much smoother than Hawaii Five-Oh's "Bing it."
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!
Not much honestly. Still use Gmail and Drive
Basically outside of Youtube I don’t use any Google service. Started by migrating to Kagi search, and while it requires a subscription, its a price I am willing to pay for a search engine that actually work good.
Everything else I use a mix of FOSS and subscription services.
That Plexus list os fantastic! Its one thing that’s always held me off of going from iOS to AOSP.
Hopefully someone can answer my main concern for years - Plexus show’s certain banking apps not requiring any Google services, but how do you get up to date versions of them installed. Relying on a 3rd party store seems quite the risk for a sensitive app like that?
if you're okay with owning a google account, then you can sign into that google account using the Aurora Store and download it there. the aurora store pulls the files from Google's repo. bearing in mind this is against google ToS so use a throwaway account; it's just for downloading apps anyway. this is the safest way i know of, it carries as much risk as using the play store.
aurora used to allow anonymous sign-ins, but that's not working at the moment. if you do want a 100% no google route, as an alternative, you could download from APKPure. it has a good reputation but the apks are uploaded by users, so there's no guarantee of safety on that front. if you go this route, you're doing so at your own risk.
on a side note, you could use the web versions of banking apps. but the website for my bank sucks. maybe yours does too lol. aurora store + signed in account is the way to go until there's a solution for anonymous logins again