Ask HN: How have you deGoogled your life?

For me, talk about "de-googling" and other such processes comes down to really thinking about what your goals are. It's easy to get into a binary all-or-nothing frame of reference, which I don't think is constructive as for most use cases "some" is still significantly different from "none."

My own goals/use cases:

- I'm unhappy with the current economics of the online world, that are based on advertising. I accept that developing products requires money, and getting money requires a business model, so if I don't like the incentives ad-based business creates, I should actively support alternative models

- I'm unhappy with the intrusiveness of tracking. I think consent is important -- not as a legal concept, but as a regular human being understands it. When I interact with a person or organization, I can meaningfully give consent for their actions. I can't meaningfully give consent to what some third party who isn't part of that interaction does, regardless of the legal fine print that says.

- I'm happy that the internet has become mainstream and people who aren't "tech people" use it.

- I'm not concerned with targeted attacks, but am concerned with opportunistic attacks against my online accounts and identities.

- Yes, "identities" -- I believe people should be able to have multiple identities online.

With those criteria, my current set up:

- password manager -- no reusued passwords. Whole family uses this.

- Fastmail. Because I use email so much, it's clearly a valuable service for me. So it' worth paying for -- I'm many years out from being a broke college student.

- A domain I purchased just for emails, and make use of subdomain addressing. I tend to use a different subdomain email per service. Goes to the goal of multiple identities, reducing tracking and reducing opportunistic attacks

- I've kept my gmail address and forward it to my fastmail, because I don't want to make my personal contacts use a different email address than they have for years. Maybe I'll change that some day, but I'm ok with _reducing_ rather than _eliminating_ google in my life

- FireFox. Also Mozilla VPN, to give Mozilla some money, though in practice I don't really have a frequent use for VPN.

- Duck Duck Go

- Ublock Origin

- Subscriptions to a handful of news outlets I read frequently. Print subscription for one of them!

- Separate computer for work vs personal

Biggest gap I'm still uncomfortable with: Shopping on Amazon.

I agree, a big issue with deGoogling is the lack of simplicity and cross compatibility, it makes life a lot harder in the digital age. Another issue is that your digital footprint says a lot about you to these data collecting agencies, and using a bunch of privacy focused technology is something that makes a good data point on you as a person and your beliefs. I think the best way to regain privacy is incrementally and changing lifestyle, making yourself less dependent on technology in the first place and substituting closed source solutions with minimal serverless open source solutions.

Yes: https://mallocate.com/blog/removing-google/

Perhaps not perfect but in consideration of some of the barriers other OEMs may posses with a security device I think the situation reads as 'being better than the alternatives'. Pixels are also an reference device by Google for Google so that is another incentive for them to suck less.

No, you really don't. You get an exaggeration of the margins of society (very often one specific direction) that is discriminated against elsewhere, unless you're also the biggest and most profitable platform. And that's YouTube.

You saw the same effect with Gab. These spaces become polarized very fast based on who is already there and what the admins believe is adequate moderation.

Odysee seems more right leaning. I don't see queer content creators on there, for instance, despite YouTube heavily demonetizing and recommendation-banning them too.

This is why I really want federated spaces, because they can serve different margins of society without becoming isolated islands.

Folding Ideas made this point (about VidMe) half a decade ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3snVCRo_bI