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De-Googling: My Progress

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Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#171

Post by lucb1e »

codethief wrote: post #147
nunorbatista wrote: post #112

I'm surprised by not seeing more comments against the OP moving from Google to move almost everything to Apple & Facebook. I've also started a similar process but haven't managed to ditch Google completely yet, mainly for convenience. Because my concern was mainly privacy, I started by adding a pi-hole in the home network and that allowed me to block an infinite number of tracking codes and ads. This improved the ove…

Why do you use Telegram if you're concerned about privacy?

I wonder the same. The reason I use Telegram is because it's the only thing I can convince a significant enough number of friends and family to move over to because of the superior user experience and non-Facebook, not because it's the most privacy-friendly solution out there. If I could choose a platform, it would probably be Wire, but the UX is pretty bad and I don't see my mom using that.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#172

Post by DrAwdeOccarim »

kmarc wrote: post #125
niemenmaa wrote: post #104

My De-Googling process: *Search(1) -> DuckDuckGo *Gmail(2) -> Fastmail *Android -> SailfishOS (https://sailfishos.org/) *Maps -> OpenStreetMaps *Youtube(3) -> Youtube-dl, "subscriptions" with rss-feeds *Drive -> Self-hosted Nextloud & Syncthing *Calendar -> At first Fastmail, but nowadays back to paper calendar *Chrome -> Brave & Firefox (1) When having problems finding I sometimes check Google Search with bangs. (2)…

Can you elaborate on the Nextcloud&Syncthing part? It would be awesome to have LAN local syncing (as Syntching does), while being able to share doc to the outside world (NextCloud's functionality). Did you figure this out? Anther topic: yeah, youtube is not something you can replace, but you can still use other frontends, thus the rabbithole recommendation engine doesn't affect you, nor the advertisements. On Android…

I use a rpi4 running raspbian and resillio sync (https://www.resilio.com/) for my internal photo backups and data syncing. It also shares outside my local network well but the users need the software installed.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#173

Post by lucb1e »

markosaric wrote: post #116

I've made similar progress too: Replaced Chrome browser with Firefox Replaced Google search with DuckDuckGo Replaced Gmail with ProtonMail Replaced Google Maps with OpenStreetMap Replaced Hangouts with Telegram Replaced Google for news with Feedly Replaced Google Translate with DeepL

+1 for Deepl. Google Translate's quality is very close to Deepl and for a long time I couldn't tell which is better, but I recently discovered that Deepl does German brainfuck sentences correctly and Google and Microsoft Translate both mess it up. (In German you can say "the ball has the dog" and by conjugating "the" correctly ("der ball" and "den hund", iirc, or the other way around, I can never remember) it can mean "the dog has the ball" despite being in the wrong order.)

Aside from self-hosted email, my list is very similar to yours, I just wanted to highlight Deepl because few people seem to know it and it's a German company so I trust that a whole lot more from the outset.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#174

Post by lucb1e »

phinnaeus wrote: post #20

I started a similar journey a couple of years ago. Honestly the biggest challenge was getting people to use my new email address instead of my Gmail. I made mostly the same choices, but swapped in: * Email/Calendar/Contacts: Fastmail * Docs: I don't use a hosted solution for this * Messaging: iMessage/Signal/Discord * Music: local music library While I lived in Seattle I was using Apple Maps, but since moving to Sydn…

> Honestly the biggest challenge was getting people to use my new email address instead of my Gmail.

That seems odd. An auto reply "this email address is no longer in use" didn't do the trick?

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#175

Post by close04 »

Jenz wrote: post #152
cyrialize wrote: post #139

I have mostly de-googled myself. For search I mainly rely on DuckDuckGo, but as many people have pointed out sometimes DuckDuckGo doesn't cut it. When that happens I either use Google or Startpage. I usually use Google when I want information about a business near me. I haven't tested this thoroughly but I think Google does a better job of getting and presenting phone numbers, accurate store hours, etc. For email I'm…

When DuckDuckGo doesn’t cut it, which IME is not often, then Google is always easily available with !g query

My biggest gripe with DDG is that if I search for a business, even when using the exact name, it will almost surely come back with a couple Yelp results (which is like getting a link to a 2005 MySpace page) followed by a dozen Facebook profiles that vaguely resemble the name of the business I was searching for.

This being said DDG was able to take over 99.99% of my searching needs for some time now. And when I have some query that doesn't seem to return anything useful on DDG it turns out Google doesn't really do much better (YMMV).

I still use Youtube and Google Maps heavily compared to alternative services. But for everything else I decided to "spread the joy" and not rely on a single provider of services.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#176

Post by lucb1e »

mouldysammich wrote: post #71

I've been slowly de-googling/de-large-corporationing. - DuckDuckGo for search mostly, trying out qwant - Runbox for email, I like the service and its incredibly cheap and have my own domain - Youtube -> miniflux for subscriptions & newpipe on my phone - I cant delete facebook but I've mitigated it to using matrix + a facebook->matrix bridge - Using osmand~ and open street maps for directions, i dont have a way to get…

> I cant delete facebook

And people ask why I have su on my phone. I want ownership, nothing more...

Anyway, for public transport directions, have you checked the apps available in F-Droid? The main ones that come to mind are Transportr and Öffi, I don't know if they work (well) whereever you're located though. Newer versions of OsmAnd can also do this to an extent, but doesn't pull the schedules (let alone realtime delays) so it only shows you "you can take bus 6 and then train 9" without knowing anything about their schedules, so that's largely useless at the moment.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#177

Post by lucb1e »

ComodoHacker wrote: post #74

>Then force Thunderbird to fully download all of my mail and then push it all back up. I didn't know it's possible to upload mail (without actually sending it) with IMAP. Do hosted providers allow that? Looks like it's additional cost with no benefit if you don't data-mine email.

This is how drafts work, so yes, this is very commonly supported.

Some people also implemented 'cloud storage' over IMAP to (ab)use the free storage that comes with gmail/hotmail/ISP/etc.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#178

Post by mceachen »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #6

> I’ve already pulled down my 2-300GB Google Photos archive How? I've tried several times and can never complete the download. Wired ethernet, not wifi.

What worked for me:

- Use the .tgz option, not .zip

- I had to manually create several large albums by year, and then created a takeout archive with just that album. Then created another archive with the next album, ... You may not need to do this, try the whole enchilada first. My wife's photo takeout didn't require this, for example.

- I had to pick smaller archive sizes. 8gb worked for me. Yes, it was a lot of chunks.

- I had to switch to Chrome (not Firefox, which is my daily driver) before the download would complete successfully.

- Downloading to my NAS directly made it fail. Had to use local disk.

- wired, not wifi

Even with all these in place, my ISP sometimes didn't allow downloads to finish successfully. I had to run them early in the morning over several days.

I had to go through and redo several chunks that corrupted themselves somehow. Verify the chunks with `gunzip -t`

Also: now that you've got your photos and videos back, you might be interested in PhotoStructure! Details are in my profile. I'm providing free access to the beta in exchange for feedback.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#179

Post by philjohn »

cyrialize wrote: post #139

I have mostly de-googled myself. For search I mainly rely on DuckDuckGo, but as many people have pointed out sometimes DuckDuckGo doesn't cut it. When that happens I either use Google or Startpage. I usually use Google when I want information about a business near me. I haven't tested this thoroughly but I think Google does a better job of getting and presenting phone numbers, accurate store hours, etc. For email I'm…

If you're looking for offsite backup (which seems to be the main use case of your use of Google Photos and now iCloud) then Backblaze if you're on Mac or Windows, or Backblaze B2 if you're on Linux is very affordable.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#180

Post by lucb1e »

rezeroed wrote: post #143

Also, if you get a new laptop (or any installation) keep it free of google. Avoid it from the start. Also, I have a website which isn't precious; I'm going to reject chrome requests, with a message recommending firefox.

Nice one. Similarly, I removed my sites from the Google search index by blocking their crawlers. Someone wants to find my content, they better use a different search engine. Anything but Google will do. Their favoring AMP results and forcing websites (the ones that rely on people coming from search for income) to implement that crap ticked me off just a little too much.
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