this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
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DeGoogle Yourself

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I haven't used it much if at all in the past year, but I finally took the last step and deleted it! Sorry if this is low effort I just don't have anyone I know to share it with.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 35 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Congrats dude! ๐Ÿ˜„ ๐Ÿ‘ I'm replacing all their service a bit at the time, is nice to see people able to completely switch off.

[โ€“] [email protected] 26 points 3 months ago (3 children)

I have literally everything tied to gmail, no idea how to escape

[โ€“] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago (1 children)

if you switch to protonmail itll foward emails from your gmail to proton, then you can slowly move stuff over

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

You can probably (never used proton) set up a filter on the new address to mark or move stuff that was originally sent to gmail, too. Helps visualize the accounts you need to migrate/update.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

It does that automatically

[โ€“] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It's a slow process. Took me 2 and a half year to completely move away from Gmail. Worth it.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Why was it worth it? What benefits did you gain from the change?

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I'm a simple man. Just knowing some entity is not munching my mail data is an enough reason for me.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

That is quite simple. You're the only one to provide a coherent answer so far so thanks for that.

I'm looking for a bit more info though. Did you get any other benefits besides the equivalent of warm fuzzies? Sounds like an extremely outsized cost/benefit assessment you had to confirm.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Well, while that's the main reason, there are indeed some side benefits as well. I guess the first one that came to my mind is, I got rid of a lot of spams. Mostly because my Gmail address was in lots of breached websites. I also deleted any unnecessary accounts at variety of websites, because of these I haven't been in a breach scandal since 2019 (That's the year I finalized my transition to Tutanota). I use it on my government accounts, banking accounts and any other formal accounts, or the ones I trust. For the rest, I use email alias services and if I get a spam or even an annoying mail through that, I can just stop it there and I forget about them.

Also it's not just warm fuzzies. Privacy is a basic human right and it should stay that way on the internet as well. So it's nice to know to be freed of personalized ads hell, at least from the voluntarily part. Can't really do anything for the involuntarily part besides GDPR. Big corporations getting our personal data is not different from someone watching my house with a binoculars, same level of creepiness. I don't think any sane mind would be comfortable knowing this.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago
  1. not being tied to G๐Ÿคฎ๐Ÿคฎgle
  2. some other stuff like email aliases (Protonmail)
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[โ€“] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago
[โ€“] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago
[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago

Congratulations! And thank you.

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

Thatโ€™s awesome ๐Ÿ‘

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago
[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (7 children)

Is there a viable Photos alternative? I was thinking of setting up a NAS on my RPi but it would need to be for other family members too.

[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Ente it you're looking for a paid service. (For me, photos are too important to self-host.) They're end-to-end encrypted and both server and clients are open source.

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

too important to self-host

For me it's the other way round. My photos are too important to trust any corporation - no matter how trustworthy they say they are.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Do you do any hosting on the cloud? Thinking of cases like a fire or flood or something

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

No I follow the 3-2-1 rule which states that you should have 3 copies in 2 locations where 1 of them is remote.

In my case, the remote part is two external SSDs where I leave one with my parents and the other one plugged into my NAS which does automatic daily backups. When my parents come I swap them around.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

TIL, thanks!

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

I second Ente, absolutely awesome products and great Devs always listening to feedback from community. Unlike other services and products, absolutely everything is open source to ๐Ÿ™Œ

[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I use immich personally, super easy to use and very fast, even on the shitty old laptop I use.

Edit: the shitty old laptop is hosting the server

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

Another vote for Immich. It's a really nice experience on both the web and app.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The Proton Drive app can automatically sync pictures from your phone. The Proton ecosystem as a whole is a good alternative to Google's.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

On that note tho, I kinda hate how this is only offered for photos. Why can't I sync any folder I want?

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Next cloud all the way. I run it in my garage and I grab the free Android app from fdroid

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago
[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

I am still uploading to Google Photos currently, but have setup a backup of my photos once a week using SMBSync2 on Android, to my Raspberry Pi NAS. I have two external hard drives connected to my pc, so when I login to my pc there are two automated backups that happen to copy anything newly added to the nas to the two hard drives.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Has anyone figured out how to transfer a Gmail account's Android app purchases to a new Google account that uses a non Gmail email address? This is the only reason I still keep my Gmail, having moved to proton 4 years ago.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Must do the same soon

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (5 children)

BTW How do you keep on syncing your calendars and stuff?

[โ€“] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

A Linux Wizard does not require a calendar. They simply arrive exactly when they are supposed to.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

lol . I'm just a baby tux apprentice ...

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I use my self-hosted Nextcloud instance for this. Then sync to mobile using DAVx5. Calendar and contacts.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

i think is the best way possible. does it have any charge?

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

It is all free to use, but you will likely have some expenses with the self-hosting. If you do it yourself at home, you require hardware and power to run it on, and you would be well off having some additional backup solution off-site as well that would add to the cost. If you host on a VPS (like I do), you have the running costs of renting that server space.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

I self host with Baikal. On android, you need Davx5 (on fdroid) to tie it into the OS but on your desktop (windows and Linux at least) calDAV will just be an option. Baikal supports CardDAV for contacts as well if you're into that.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Idk I don't have a calendar, but I hear nextcloud is great for that

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

I use nextcloud for all these google things.

Currently using murena.io as provider

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Proton Calendar works great for me.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Nice. What services did you use to replace?

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I now use Firefox, brave search, protonmail and immich

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