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.

    • kostel_thecreedEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Get ublock origin and use medium mode to globally block anything google related.

      To further compartmentalize your YouTube you can do this (assuming you are in the USA and wish to continue using premium)

      • Use a VPN and choose a US based server
      • Make a google account in a seperate profile, preferably configured for maximum privacy. For the phone number use a one time SMS and then add totp 2fa so that they won’t message the number
      • Use privacy.com and purchase the premium from there. You can use a fake name since privacy will redirect the transaction regardless
      • Always switch up the VPN server throughout the US and make sure you do not login without the VPN!

      This is not bullet-proof, and it would be preferred to use a front-end while using a VPN, but that won’t work if you want YT premium.

    • jcarax@beehaw.orgEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      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…