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.
I’ve #degoogled a lot, but Graphene is not an option. Waiting on a Harmony NextOS phone so I can dump Android altogether. I’ve seen some high end Huawei phones in my area sporting it, but am waiting for something I can afford from Xiaomi, OPPO or Vivo. I’d rather hand my data to the Chinese than Google and 5-Eyes.
Awesome, how do yoi like the Graphene experience? I just switched from Samsung to a Pixel and installed Graphene as soon as I got it. Still getting used to things, and still using some Google services and apps. Have you found good replacements for things like Android Auto and RCS for text messages (not that I can get RCS working yet in any case)?
NextCloud and Ente look interesting, I need to check those out for Photos and Drive alternatives.
I’ve been enjoying GrapheneOS. It’s seems to fun well for me and the battery life seems to be great. I made a point to not use any Google apps so that means no RCS for me. My car doesn’t have Android Auto so I’m not sure about a replacement.
I’d use Firefox too… LibreOffice to get an office suite. DuckDuckGo is still feeding Google - sadly.
What alternative would you suggest over DuckDuckGo? I’m always looking to learn more.
I like searxng, you can self hosted and its very private. It will pull all results from google, duckduckgo, bing, etc.
Anyone have good alternatives to Google Sheets? I don’t even care about the social features. I gave LibreOffice Calc a shot and it was super frustrating. Seems like maybe CryptPad is my best bet as far as open source goes?
I never really used sheets. I know standard notes has tables, but it’s probably not nearly what you’d need. Cryptpad is intriguing, but the lack of mobile apps or apps in general is a hurdle for me.
Damn boi good on you. Welcome to the degoogled fam
Congratulations. Only moving away from Google entirely took me 3+ years. You really killed this fast.
I was at home recovering from lumber fusion so I had some free time on my hands b🤣
I would consider that incredibly fast if you are an ent, then.
I hope the surgery went well!
Great! All of these are great alternatives, but I would replace Firefox with librewolf.
What would you use on Android?
Vanadium
I second that you use Librewolf, which is a hardened fork of Firefox.
But beware of using any recent firefox, zen, and librewolf packages from the AUR. They supposedly contain malware.
Or run arkenfox settings tool on firefox
Welcome! that’s quite a list of changes and i am impressed how fast you’re freeing yourself from shit platforms.
You hit a lot of good checklist items, well done.
Thanks for sharing this list. Bookmarking for when I’ll be doing the same.
If you’re in need of GPS for android auto, I recommend organic maps as an entirely offline and privacy respecting alternative to Google maps.
I’ve tried this one I got fined because it sent me through a road that was recently switched to “license holders only”. Mostly my fault because I didn’t see the sign but another time it tried to send me through roadworks and refused any alternatives. However great the idea of OpenStreetMaps is, community based maps are only as good if you have community members nearby.
I’ll stick with Waze for navigation.
comaps is the new community one
Oh thanks for the tip. Trying it today.
Apart from being a fork, why would I move to Comaps? I checked and Organic Maps was still being updated. I wouldn’t mind moving given a reason, though I don’t see the point yet
organic maps has taken steps to move toward privatization. here is the open letter by the CoMaps founders about why they stopped contributing to organic and started CoMaps
Thank you for explaining it and the source, I’m swapping over right now
If you still use your Google account to synchronize your contacts and calendar, you can move them to Nextcloud too.
Also make sure to uninstall the Facebook app from your devices as well as any other Meta owned apps like Instagram. It was somewhat recently discovered they are using it as a backdoor to your web browsing history on any websites with Meta plugins, even when the browser isn’t tracking you directly. Though GrapheneOS should prevent that communication between apps if you don’t give the web browser extra permissions, better to be safe.
I’ve uninstalled all those apps!
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!
what did you use for your 2fa codes? Most of mine are in google authenticator and I would likely need to migrate them first.
I moved my extensive 2FA to Bitwarden Authenticator - I think I had to scan the migration QR codes from Google authenticator and recover the keys manually but it worked fine
Aegis is another option. I use vaultwarden for most OTP.
+1 on Aegis, love it, it’s FOSS and on F-droid. Can make auto backups/exports (encrypted/not), can register codes from a screenshot of a QR code (love that feature when I’m on my phone), it’s a simple and clean design overall.
Most MFA codes I can store in freeotp+. Import/export function means I can back it up, too.
I keep mine in 2FAS and Vaultwarden.
Same Here: 2FAS. If you are into coding, you can also write your own: there are lots of libraries to do the cryptography for you.
I have found something yet, but I’ve heard ENTE Authenticator is pretty good.
