degoogling

Sometime around 2021 I began to feel that use of Google services constituted a grave threat to my digital sovereignty, and began slowly moving off of them.

Here in 2024 I still have a Google account and probably will for the foreseeable future, because Google Fi and Google Fiber remain the best cell service and internet service providers, and you need a Google account to pay for them.

Today I use my Google account for five things:

• As an OAuth identity for services that require one - literally just Tailscale, I have replaced everything else with email-based accounts
• Filling out Google Forms - please stop using these folks, they often require a Google account
• Access to shared Google Photos albums
• Google Fi (cell service)
• Google Fiber (internet)

Despite these limited use cases, which are all provided for free with a personal-tier Google account, I still have to pay for Google Suite ($8/month). Why? Because years ago when I wanted to use a custom domain on my Gmail account, I started paying for Google Suite to enable this functionality. When you do this, your Google account is converted from a “Personal” to a “Business” account. This is a one way transition. Once this happens, if you stop paying for it, your level of services drops *below* that offered to a free personal Google account. So unless I want to completely disable my Google account (spoilers: I do, but not yet) I have to continue to pay Google, because they don't offer a downgrade path.

Below I share what I have replaced various Google services with.

Migrated from Gmail first to Protonmail, and then in 2023 to Fastmail, which I am much more satisfied with. I was paying for GSuite for Business in order to use a custom domain name, now I pay Fastmail for that.

I now pay for Kagi.

This is a tough one. I have replaced Google Drive with a combination of the following

• For files shared only among my own devices, I use a storage array on my home server mounted on all my devices (yes, even iPhone) via Samba
• For files shared to others, I self host Filestash on my cloud VM, but this isn't ideal because of space limitations on the VM disk. Similar issue with Nextcloud. Recently (yesterday) I started using magic wormhole for p2p transfers and really like it. I have tried Syncthing but it's too hard to use for most people and is geared towards syncing and not transfers. Wormhole has GUI clients that are usable by plebeians.

For hosting my personal photos, I replaced Google Photos with Photoprism.

Sharing photos is much more complicated. The usual situation for me is that I go on a trip with a bunch of people, and afterwards someone sets up a shared Google Photos album, everyone uploads their pictures to Google Photos and then adds them to the album. I am usually the odd one out complaining about this. So far I have done one of two things:

• Uploaded my photos to the shared album, advised all participants that they will be deleted in 2 weeks, and then delete them in 2 weeks
• Zipped the photos and shared directly via one of the methods described in the previous section

This is much to the chagrin of people I go on group trips with, because they don't understand why I can't just use Google Photos like them and I end up being viewed as a source of inconvenience. Oh well.

I run Nextcloud on my home server and have replaced G services with Nextcloud's cardDAV and calDAV implementations. This legitimately works better than Google's services.

For hosting my own videos, I have replaced it with Peertube, although my YouTube channel is still up because I haven't gotten around to wiping it yet.

Unfortunately one video I made has popped off, and since it's educational I'm a little reluctant to take it down. I will probably make a video explaining how to get to my Peertube, upload that to YouTube, and then take everything else down. Then when I finally get around to deleting my Google account, that will disappear too.

Of course I still watch videos on YouTube, and I still subscribe to channels. However, I do it via a self-hosted instance of invidious. This way all my subscription data information etc is kept on my home server. On my iPhone I use yattee as a client to my Invidious instance, so I get a YouTube app-like experience. Also has the side effect of being ad-free

Replaced first by Notion, and then Obsidian.

Bought an iPhone.