I feel like #degoogle seems to embody a greater movement to leave bigtech. Here are the crazy things I’ve done over the last month or so.
- Installed Arch on my laptop about a month ago
- re-engaged my Mastodon and Bluesky while deleting Twitter and unfriending everyone on Facebook
- Installed GrapheneOS on my Pixel
- Moved email to custom domain and Tuta from Gmail
- Moved to NextCloud in place of Google Drive
- Moved photos from Google Photos to Ente Photos
- Moved my PKM and Notes to Logseq
- Moved from Chome and Google Search to Firefox, Tor and DuckDuckGo
- Just deleted Reddit and started a Lemmy account.
It’s been a ride and I’m open to other suggestions and guides.
Congratulation! familiar list. The workload was quite surprising, wasn’t it? How many google/gmail logins you had to change? Youtube to freetube? Or how you going with that?
To me META was quite hard to cut off because there is not really alternative to whatsapp. However META is probably the most toxic from those 5 so it felt best.
It was a lot of work. I had the benefit of having time off and recovering from spinal fusion to make this happen. I deleted many of my accounts that I used gmail for logins. My gmail address that people have had for years is now forwarding to my custom domain. For YouTube I’ve been using PeerTube and not using YouTube at all.
Meta is hard as I manage pages for work, but I currently have no friends which caused my wife to get messages from friends asking if we were getting divorced 🤣. I’ve brought my wife, sister and mom over to Signal so far by SMS is difficult to get people to change. I just cancled my Whatsapp account and if people want to connect they can reach out.
The hardest part is to have your mail sent directly to your domain, skipping Google entirely. It’s such a painful process!
I started with a passive-aggressive strategy delaying replies to who still uses gmail: “apologies, I rarely use gmail these days…”
That’s is a good idea!