For me it’s Whatsapp. Like 99% of people i know use it so yeh… i still need it. I am considering moving the Whatsapp Gdrive backup to a local backup btw.
Google photos is also a major problem for us. We have a lot of stuff that want to migrate to different service (or store locally).
For photos I’ve been using immich and I’m a fan. I’ve heard decent things about Ente photo too.
Next cloud has done much of the heavy lifting. You can adjust android (if you’re stuck on android) to move photos, backup, contacts, and calendar to it using the next cloud suite of apps. Calendar and contacts can sync with it using davx5. I bought 5tb for $15 with hetzners managed next cloud service and i dont even have to manage it really.
I use proton for email and have use email aliases with my own domain pointed at my proton email, so that if i ever want to stop using proton I can easily migrate. I have my gmails in maintenance mode - when i get a new email for something I forgot I go to that website and either change the email or kill the account by asking for GDPR deletion. Even if you aren’t European asking a site for GDPR deletion will usually get them to comply because they aren’t going to go through the effort to check if you’ve moved or something.
And for YouTube I use freetube / invidious For music I use deezer, but ive also heard good things about qobuz.
WhatsApp wad a sticking point for me too in Europe. My landlord sends me my bills through it and every business uses it for appointments and customer service. I use a matrix bridge to give me an extra layer between it and my devices, which helps so i dont have to have tbe app itself.
I got rid of Google easily. Unfortunately, I still have to use their Messages app for Rcs, and Youtube. But replaced all the other products.
14 years on Linux, 2 years with a graphene phone, no google play apps at all.
Replacing Gmail with posteo.com took the longest, adjusting everything per website, and testing, One drive has been replaced by https://filen.io/
A happy user again with control of everything.
I’m still working to get rid of google, I’m worried there’s no way to transfer all my photos from google photos and I still use the tasks app and calendar.
For the things I did switch, I found a suite of apps under the name Fossify which I use for my gallery, phone app and file manager.
I still have a Google account (down from four). But in the past, I used this for literally EVERYTHING ; now I only use it for a couple of incoming, remaining emails. Posteo is my email and calendar today. That’s a big step already. Same with google maps: ive switched to other European providers, but occasionally i may still use Google Maps. I canceled Meta completely, no more FB, IG or WhatsApp; instead I use the fediverse alternatives, and SMS or signal for messaging. Lemmy instead of Reddit. I use a hard drive for storing files; I have nothing anymore in a Cloud, but sometimes colleagues force me to use Google Drive. Overall I’m pleased; Perhaps it’s not about canceling everything consistently, but a 95% reduction is a good initial achievement.
My friends and I all use Facebook’s messenger as our group chat and Discord for voice calls while gaming. That group chat is literally the only reason why I haven’t deleted my Facebook account yet. I have a Matrix space ready and have convinced a couple of people to make accounts and join the space, but it is just not being used at all. I was actually hoping someone was going to need to provide an ID to log into their discord account as that would most likely be the final push that moved everyone from messenger and discord over to Matrix, but so far it hasn’t happened and the Matrix space sits vacant
Deleting facebook is tricky in sooo many ways. From a tech view, it is so hard to find a “Delete account” button. You literally need to dig through random places to find it.
From a consumer view, it is very hard to truly delete it. Notice how facebook gave you a time limit in case you change your mind?
I know it’s basically impossible to make them delete the data they already have on me, I really just want to stop using their service
Not only that, but many local businesses don’t have websites and just use Facebook. Marketplace is another reason, Craigslist is practically dead near me.
A few weeks ago, some friends and I decided to go out for some drinks. We agreed upon a place and met up, only to find there was a Journey cover band performing with a $10 cover charge at the door. All of us hate Journey lol
I checked the website beforehand but it hadn’t been updated in months. However a friend checked their facebook page after we found out, and saw that they had posted about the band on there only 24 hours before.
Google Maps is still more complete than Open Street Maps, although the temptation to just DISBALE Google Maps and worry about the fallout of that later is still there.
You might have then noticed that the biggest Google dependency I have is Android. Yeah, that will be a hard sell. I don’t have easy access to any Linux phones either - although Linux now has a slop problem and it’s as deep as the kernel. Ugh.
I hear that a lot about WhatsApp—that everyone they know uses it—but I’ve never known anyone in my life who does. I mean what’s wrong with your phone’s built-in dialer? Or literally any other free VoIP app if paying your phone bill is the issue? What does WhatsApp provide that alternatives don’t?
It depends where you live. Whatsapp is the default way of communicating in a lot of countries, way more popular than text messages. You might be able to get individuals to contact you another way, but if the group chat is in WhatsApp, you’re probably not going to persuade the group to change.
Thanks but that only leaves me with more questions. Why is it that way in so many countries? Why don’t they use alternatives? Do they like being slaves to Meta, having their entire lives being monitored by the company?
It wasn’t always a Meta product. Also, by the time everyone started finding out how evil Facebook was, Whatsapp was too entrenched for people to easily switch to something else, not when all their friends and family members were using it.
In a lot of places, SMS is/was more expensive (and Whatsapp seen as affordable/available) around the time Whatsapp took off. If you’re from somewhere like a relatively small EU country where you’re more likely to want to message people from other countries, there’s also the issue of international rates. So SMS had more disadvantages in some places and wasn’t necessarily as widely adopted as in the US. And some places didn’t have quite the same progression from dumb phone texting to smartphone texting that the US had, either because of costs or lacking infrastructure. More people skipped the widespread dumb phone texting phase, and internet access was expanding. So there was no reason not to use a cheaper internet-based service from a provider people didn’t think was evil at the time.
I moved away years ago, the hardest thing is changing your email on every website. It takes awhile.
It didn’t take too long to get away from google. I had my first google mail account only for registering my first Android phone. It has never been my main email address and I was always annoyed by this “log in with google”, so I never used that. In return I had almost no services connected to my google mail.
Then I just flashed LineageOS and created a mail address at mailbox.org. After that, I quit Facebook, Instagram one after another, but I haven’t used those services in a while.
The hardest was leaving WhatsApp, but I now have my whole friend circle and my 80+ parents on signal, so that’s great!All in all it was a process over multiple years, as I had to learn a lot of things. But I left early enough to not get involved with the modern shit. Nowadays I flash phones for friends, running some self hosted stuff such as Jellyfin as a side hobby.
I finally ditched Windows 2 years ago, I was always afraid I could play video games anymore. But oh boy I was wrong, Linux Mint is a beast.
I’ve been with Posteo almost a decade, that part was pretty easy. I remember downloading everything from Google Drive was pretty easy back then as well.
Then I used stock android until maybe a year ago when my phone was too old to get updates and too old to be supported by my banks app so I migrated to LineageOS.
The messaging app landscape is kind of a mess, so I use SMS/MMS BC as you’ve noted the landscape is fragmented at best.
I solved file storage with AlainKnaff/Android-SFTP-Documents-Provider which just SFTPs into my desktop at home.
Giving up android has felt too scary
Mobile Linux isn’t ready. It’s going to be soon, but it’s just not yet.
Key pain points are hardware selection, video acceleration, sleep mode and on-screen keyboards.
Edit: and audio and mobile data/modems…
A lot of these are not developer problems, rather hostile manufacturers, but it makes little difference in the end-user experience.
Thanks for just not shouting me down about how I don’t want it badly enough or whatever. I’m not a tech idiot exactly, I have my own home storage server, I can do simple stuff like that, but a lot of people are just unable to admit how difficult it actually can be to completely wean off the big tech companies.
Yeah, it can be easy to forget we don’t all have the same tech skill nor same amount of time to dedicate to honing it. On the desktop, I moved to the easiest Linux distro for me…on the phone I tried Graphene and Lineage, and giving each a day to try to make work for my use-case, neither did, so I reluctantly went back to Android. I intend to try again, but in the meantime, I’ve decided using Android, not logged into a Google account, and not using any Google apps inside it is my equilibrium between my desire to de-Google and the amount of time and effort I can currently put in.
Still on android and youtube unfortunately,
Shout out to Freetube as an ad-free YT front-end replacement
Desktop: https://freetubeapp.io/#download
Android: https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/io.freetubeapp.freetube
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