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 (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-only 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…
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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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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.
I’m using ProtonMail with my own domain, DuckDuckGo, self-hosted photo album, Firefox and PC/iOS devices. The only thing I have a Google account for is for a paid YouTube subscription, which I use in a Firefox container tab.
I’d like to think I’m pretty degoogled, but due to network effects, I’m probably not. Everyone I send email to has a Gmail address, every web page I visit has Google Analytics (which Firefox may or may not block, I cannot be sure about that) and most people who have my phone number have it stored on their Android device. So Google gets a shit ton of data about me indirectly, regardless of whether I consent to it or not.
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…
I ran PhotoPrism on my home server for awhile but realized it was a bit overkill for my use case. Now I just use my NAS server’s built in photo gallery app (QNAP Photo Station), in which I can create shared albums that I can expose to the internet with Caddy server acting as reverse proxy and an extra authentication layer. I have a custom domain that hosts the photo gallery so I can copy and paste a magic URL plus login credentials into a Signal chat to anyone who asks (and whom I trust).
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.
100% degoogled. Everything is selfhosted, except for Telegram. Even at job :)
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
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.
Ooh, I’ll have to look into photoprism. Thank you!
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?
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 agoGoogle 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…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 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.
Deleting the old email account that fast is a bit risky. I still have my old yahoo account after switching to posteo two years ago and still sometimes get mails to it.
Not much. I consider Google to be one of the least offensive players in the category. Besides, using another provider to handle your data exposes it to new risks. Is the other provider actually more privacy preserving? How’s their security track record? Do they have a sustainable business model that complies with providing better privacy? Is there anything preventing them to make a 180? Are you paying for it? Who are their investors? Etc. 🤔
Self hosting using open source software is a real alternative but it’s far from trivial and therefore not available to most but the more knowledgable technical people. It requires significant work even when automation is used and security can be botched fairly easily. If the data leaks, privacy evaporates. I run a lot of self hosted services.
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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.
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 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.
Edit: I also pay for Kagi for search. The price is a bit steep but I have found it justifiable in terms of the value I get from it. Whoogle and Searx are good options too
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!
