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.
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.
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?
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…
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.
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).
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!
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 agree here. I pay a premium for no bloatware and the one company using my data is the company I bought the device from. I’m sure this mindset will change over time. My hopes are we see iPhone stay privacy centric vs vanilla android.
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:
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.
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.
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!
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 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
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.
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 :)
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !technology@beehaw.org
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
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.
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!
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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…
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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 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!
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
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 😁
I agree here. I pay a premium for no bloatware and the one company using my data is the company I bought the device from. I’m sure this mindset will change over time. My hopes are we see iPhone stay privacy centric vs vanilla android.
Money always prevails though.
Only apps by Google I use are gboard, gmail and translator. If someone knows well designed alternatives please share.
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.
If swipe typing is your thing, take a look at anysoft keyboard (but be prepared to do a lot of menu diving!)
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
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.
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.
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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 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 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
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.
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 :)
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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!
🪙🪙
Upvote i guess ❤️🍓