this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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I'm working on essentially removing Google from my life.
[email protected]
For me the most annoying part was switching off gmail (I went to fastmail) and the hardest habbit to break was Google search (I mostly use DDG).
I use fastmail, great service.
What motivated me to do that is finding these megacorp providers do not keep your email private.
I don't remember what my breaking point was, but since I dropped gmail there have been 2 or 3 announcements about it that would have gotten me to that point again.
That is the only solution to all this!
To everyone: Please remove at least as much Google products/services as you can from your life. Start with the easiest ones. Have a plan and gradually find alternatives for all other products/services of them. Remove them from your life. It will help even if you do this partly. This is for the benefit of us all.
Also, let's do the same to Microsoft, Apple, Meta, Reddit etc. Let's not let our lives depend on them. They are corporations. They are programmed to maximize profit.
I know there's currently not a lot of good alternatives out there, but if enough of us ditch these ass-companies, more and more open-source, decentralized, not-for-benefit services will pop up, and the existing ones will improve greatly. These are not for-profit projects that can be bought by corporations later and used to their benefit. They will only benefit their users.
Let's do this!
Fuck megacorporations!
The difficult part is finding real alternatives that fundamentally improve the situation. Most of the alternatives out there are just shams, which have all the same problems, but are more expensive, less reliable or otherwise fundamentally flawed. Be it the Feddiverse (literally just a central server, all the federation is optional), Firefox (Google's way to fend of monopoly lawsuits and stop real alternatives from arising, still telemetry, constantly tries to sell you something) or self hosting (pay more, get less).
Linux on a PC works well enough as Windows alternative, but as soon as it comes to anything networking/Web/cloud related things are a f'n wasteland. The part I don't get is why we still don't even have a reliable way to hole-punch through NAT and an alternative to DNS in the Free Software world. That has been the major pain point for at least the last 20 years and is the major stopping block for true P2P alternative software, but it's still largely an unsolved problems (
libp2pis one way to deal with it, but not in widespread use and still has numerous problems from what I understand).I wish it were feasible to get off youtube..
@ConfusedLlama @jherazob @kool_newt At this point I'm starting to wonder if an iPhone might be the lesser of two evils… sheesh
The only thing I have left is YouTube. Apparently Piped allows registering and then storing subscriptions, maybe I'll move mine there.
Gotta say, deleting my google account would be very awesome to do
I use FreeTube, which is opensource and allows you to subscribe to channels without an account. The awesome thing is that you can categorize channels under different "profiles".
However, I think it won't take too long for Google to paywall YouTube APIs and do what it can to prevent web scraping (through disabling login-less use or attempts such as the one linked in this thread.). So our best option would be to ask our favorite Youtubers to move (or duplicate) their videos to other platforms such a peertube, and start using those platforms ourselves.
Use invidious to watch YT videos "outside YT". I think viewing from there doesn't count towards their metrics, so you're "freeloading" on their content. Some instances:
Not a bad idea. Just also avoid Microsoft, Apple, and any non-open hardware or software... they all do the same stuff or worse.
I don't let perfection be the enemy of progress.
Is it progress, or just picking a different cage?
Good luck in your voyages though, my approach is to try keeping stuff in multiple cages, also far from perfect.
Spoiler for a later stage of your journey: Your phone gets wayv faster. That part is pretty nice.
Oh really? Is this from like not having to contact google analytics for every action?
I'm not sure, honestly.
Charitably, we could assume it's just from removing Google and various carriers background apps meant to improve my experience.
Uncharitably, I have my suspicions. For the last five or so versions of Android something always seemed to be using processor cycles and battery when I wasn't actually doing much with my phone.
But I never saw evidence of usage data exfiltration via Google apps - at least after I turned off the related optional settings.
In any case, switching to GrapheneOs was a startling and pleasant speed boost for me, whatever the real root cause.