this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023

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How much of your life have you degoogled? (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by frogman@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

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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.

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[–] thayer@lemmy.ca 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (8 children)

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-dominated environment.

[–] PR_freak@vlemmy.net 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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

[–] aeternum@kbin.social 2 points 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)

[–] dtc@lemmy.pt 1 points 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.

[–] rmicielski@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have to just be sure that you at least know about demicrosofted VS Code, VS Codium

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[–] clearedtoland@lemmy.fmhy.ml 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)

So um…how do I show the lemmyverse that this is a really important post without the shiny meaningless gold coin?

[–] lowleveldata@programming.dev 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

idk. Try writing a poem?

[–] BlueEther@no.lastname.nz 1 points 1 year ago

I can write poetry, so I asked a new friend:

In the realm of tech's changing tide,
Where billions flowed like an endless ride,
Investor money, a torrent's stream,
Built startups bright with a lofty dream.

But now, the era draws to a close,
As monoliths emerge, the story goes.
They tighten their grip, a vice-like hold,
Squeezing pennies from users, bold and cold.

Fair or not, the question arises,
Do we still want to wear their disguises?
Are we mere billboards, a canvas for their name,
Or can we reclaim our autonomy, break free from the game?

In this pivotal moment, we must pause,
Reconsider, question, and find our cause.
To degoogling, a path unfolds,
Where privacy and freedom firmly hold.

Privacy Guides, a beacon of light,
Leading us to services that respect our right.
No longer pawns in their data-collecting scheme,
We seek alternatives that make our souls gleam.

Plexus, a treasure trove of shared knowledge,
Mapping compatibility beyond the edge.
A community united, hand in hand,
Building a future where we take a stand.

And in that random PDF, a study's gaze,
Unveiling the truth in Google's data maze.
Awareness dawns, eyes open wide,
As we uncover the layers they've tried to hide.

So let us step back, reassess our role,
As users, as consumers, with a collective goal.
To break free from the clutches that bind,
Embrace a future where our privacy we find.

For the era of user exploitation wanes,
And in its place, a new dawn remains.
Where we reclaim our voices, make choices anew,
And shape a world where fairness rings true.

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[–] sweBers@lemmy.fmhy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

Interact, share. Be positive.

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[–] lpslucasps@lemmy.pt 5 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] lividhen@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] McBinary@midwest.social 1 points 1 year ago

Pixelfed is a federated decentralized image and video host you might look into.

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[–] Segin@vlemmy.net 5 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] geon@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] frogman@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] geon@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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!

[–] frogman@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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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[–] pztrn@bin.pztrn.online 4 points 1 year ago

100% degoogled. Everything is selfhosted, except for Telegram. Even at job :)

[–] deFrisselle@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 1 year ago

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

[–] themizarkshow@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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

[–] evilviper@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

How is the proton pass 2FA? I saw they have that it haven't gotten around to switching from Authy yet.

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[–] thaedrus@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] sculd@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Basically degoogled except YouTube because content creators are on that platform. Also occasionally needs to use Google search because DDG sometimes doesn't work.

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[–] pastelsquirrel@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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

[–] bug@lemmy.one 2 points 1 year ago

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!

[–] HawlSera@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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

[–] Rainhall@feddit.online 2 points 1 year ago

DuckDuckGo got a shoutout from Star Trek: Strange New Worlds this week. Much smoother than Hawaii Five-Oh's "Bing it."

[–] TeaEarlGrayHot@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I've been running my own Nextcloud instance since 2020, which, combined with ProtonMail, has replaced basically everything I was using Google/Microsoft for

[–] Sinfaen@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

Didn't realize you could host your own, that's good to know

[–] rm_dash_r_star@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

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.

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[–] beejjorgensen@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago

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)

[–] PiselloSauro@feddit.it 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] Coeus@coeus.sbs 1 points 1 year ago

I'm still in the Google android stuff just because of convenience but I have ditched Chrome and Google search. Eventually I would like to do more.

[–] tokadorium@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Only apps by Google I use are gboard, gmail and translator. If someone knows well designed alternatives please share.

[–] MasterCelebrator@feddit.de 3 points 1 year ago

For Mail i reccommend proton. They also offer cloud, calendar, VPN and recently a password Manager. You can also use their simplelogin Service which Provides alias Mails. These can be used so that you dont have to give your real mail Adress to online Services and so on.

[–] StandardIssueCalzone@lemmy.one 2 points 1 year ago

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

[–] tranceFusion@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fastmail is fantastic from a user experience perspective, though depending on your privacy demands it may not pass the test.

[–] nickb333@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Long time Fastmail user here. Where is it failing with respect to privacy?

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[–] AbidingOhmsLaw@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

I try not to use anything google with exception of a few YouTube videos, but I don’t have an account, I also have most of their tracking/ad sites blocked on my network (Apple too), if that blocks a site / video from working then I don’t use that site.

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