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.

Gdrive has many uses. Replacing it means replacing each function.

Tried and rejected:

• Filestash - kept running out of space on cloud VMs, software buggy
• Nextcloud - too heavy to host a public instance just for filesharing
• magic wormhole - works, but people don't want to install programs to receive files and the mobile story is bad. shout out rymdport for favorite client.
• Syncthing - It's a sync program, it isn't intended for unidirectional file transfer and thus doesn't work well for that purpose

I now pay for Dropbox. Upload to folder, share link. Sometimes you just gotta pay and move on.

Okay, “cloud storage” is not really a function. There's two main reasons we use personal cloud storage:

1. So that we can store files in one logical “place” and then access them from any device
2. To save space on our devices

There's other reasons, mostly to do with reliability engineering, but those are the main two.

I think a lot of people - myself included - get fixated on the “single source of truth” paradigm. Files live in one big beautiful cluster that you can access from any device. I see the appeal. You can focus all your efforts making that cluster as big and beautiful as you want, as resilient as you want. But after spending lots of time building out a big beautiful cluster, I kept having the experience that I wanted some file and I just couldn't get to it. And when I could get to it the experience of browsing around, searching, transferring files all over a network just…sucks. After you buy into the paradigm, after a while you get used to it and forget that it doesn't have to be like that. It's totally possible to have all that data on a superfast SSD drive right next to your CPU, easily searchable and accessible at all times.

I finally realized that I fundamentally hate network storage as a primary storage location. It requires a network and even when you have one it's just too slow. Shortly after that I looked at storage prices, and suddenly, it turns out that you can get huge amounts of storage for not a lot of money. Granted, it depends on the size of your frequently accessed data, which I term your “working set”. For me that's photos, music, documents, and projects. For me, at today's storage unit prices, I can afford around 6-8tb of working set. That's a lot! My actual working set, the stuff I access on a regular basis, fits in that with a couple tb to spare.

Yes, some things are just too big to store on device. At today's storage unit prices, storing 30tb of movies that you access once a year on your laptop doesn't make sense yet for most people. And for that, networked storage is fine - you rarely access those items.

After assessing my current data distribution and doing some consolidation I established that 8tb could store all of my frequently accessed“ files. This covers my music, photos, documents, and projects. It doesn't include stuff that falls in the bucket of “huge binary files” - movies, 300gb DNxHD Resolve projects, that sort of thing.

Since it was about time for a new laptop anyway, I converted every computer I own to have at least 8tb of storage, consolidated my working set into a single directory, and synced it to all devices in one epic multi-day multi-terabyte sync session.

I feel like I hit storage nirvana. I get on an airplane, spend a few hours editing a spreadsheet or something, close my laptop. By the time I get home all of that work has opportunistically synced to all my other computers and I can sit down at my desktop and open that file. It's amazing. I barely need to touch my big chungus pool.

For hosting my personal photos, I initially replaced Google Photos with Photoprism. I also tried Immich and while I know this is considered heretical, it doesn't suit my needs. I ultimately gave up on server-based photo management, but that's another story.

The short of it is that I now store all my photos in a plain local directory synced across devices.

Sharing photos is 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 “the shared album”.

When you upload pictures to a “shared album”, they are in fact uploaded to your personal Google Photos account and then are published such that anyone with access to the shared album has access to those photos. Consequently you can't add photos to shared albums without storing photos in Google Photos. If you later delete those photos they disappear from the shared album.

I have tried various methods of sharing my photos with gphotos users, including:

• Uploading my photos “to” the shared album, advising all participants that they will be deleted in 2 weeks, and then deleting them
• Zipping the photos and sharing the zip via one of the methods described in the previous section

My current solution is to dump all my photos into a Dropbox album and send people the link. Whenever I need to free up space I delete the dropbox folder. I still have all the photos locally in my own library so I can reshare if needed.

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.

I run Nextcloud on my home server and have replaced G services with Nextcloud's CardDAV and CalDAV implementations. These legitimately work better than Google Calendar and Google Contacts, especially on iOS which has first class support for CardDAV and CalDAV baked into the system; consequently system apps and facilities that rely on accurate calendar and contact sync work flawlessly.

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

See note taking programs.

Bought an iPhone.