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.

  • Beej JorgensenEnglish
    6•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)
    • JasSmith
      2•1 year ago

      Yeah switching from Gmail to my own domain was a pain but gives me huge peace of mind. The horror stories of people losing access to their accounts for any and no reason at all pushed me to migrate.

    • @esaru@beehaw.orgEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      You can replace the rest with

      Drive for backups -> Nextcloud

      Contacts -> Nextcloud or EteSync

      Calender -> Nextcloud or EteSync

      Keep -> Nextcloud (share files per link)

      Pixel Phone: install GrapheneOS

      Youtube: hard to replace in my opinion, but use NewPipe