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 billboards for these companies anymore.
For anyone unfamiliar, some good resources to have when starting your degoogling 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.
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!
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.
Basically degoogled except YouTube because content creators are on that platform. Also occasionally needs to use Google search because DDG sometimes doesn’t work.
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.
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
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!
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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
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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 :)
90% of my life is degoogled. I’m using Google Play services for some stuff (It doesn’t have network access 😶) it my normal profile. My work profile is completely degoogled.
I’ve been Google free for the past few years. Use Tutanota for my email, Startpage for search (with the occasional Brave or DDG search), and use Piped for YouTube videos. Been trying out Peertube the past few days, but it’s hard to topple YT.
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
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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!
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.
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.
I used to be on GrapheneOS, but the drama with the developer plus mainly not being able to put my university ID on the wallet, forced me back on stock Android.
Besides Android, I use Google Play Store, YouTube, and Maps. For YouTube I’ve technically degoogled, using Invidious and NewPipe, but that’s obviously still using Google services.
I really wish that digital payment didn’t rely on two proprietary services (Google Wallet and Apple Wallet). It would be so much easier for phone companies to ship privacy friendly versions of Android if there was a FOSS alternative directly integrated into AOSP. I also wish apps didn’t have to use Google service framework just to function, it seems stupid af. I don’t think this will ever improve, so I’ll probably end up on a true Linux phone whenever those catch up (2030 YEAR OF THE LINUX PHONE???)
We also need open collaboration on mapping. There is the OpenStreetMaps and Overture maps from Linux foundation, but those aren’t really there yet unfortunately.
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.
