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).
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.
For photos I’ve been using immich and I’m a fan. I’ve heard decent things about Ente photo too.
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.
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 am also interested in this topic, but one specific thing gets me and I have some observations about it.
What’sApp. I’m in Europe and actually signed up before Meta took it over. It’s predominate in my industry (it was first yahoo chat then skype and now WhatsApp).
A large reason I am valuable to my company and keep getting paid is my network. Here is the observation: I have gotten a lot of people to switch to Signal, but they are all except one Gen X like me. Millennials and Zoomers simply cannot imagine that using WhatsApp for often highly, highly sensitive conversations is a problem. Like, a potentially big legal problem.
Not dunking on “the kids these days” because they are far more evolved than other gens about so many things. But they just seem incurious about what underlies the tech they use. I suppose?
We are moving in different circles then, because my Millenials and Zoomers are very much on Signal, or even more nieche stuff. Meanwhile anyone over 45 seems to be glued to all the Google, Meta and Microsoft products.
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.
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 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.
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 moved away years ago, the hardest thing is changing your email on every website. It takes awhile.
Sometimes it’s impossible too. I had some badly designed services where it’s just completely impossible to change email, even with contacting their support team. Email forwarding rules are really good here, but they get confused if you reply with a different email address than they sent to
My vet and my doctors office are like this. Everything for my doctors office says my new email everywhere. Even in the 2FA section. Need to log in with 2FA? Straight to the gmail! No option for an authenticator app either.
I just went to Immich for my Google photos replacement. I’ve heard good things about Ente photos as well.
I’ve been able to get rid of everything except Google maps. I tried magic earth for a year, but it wasn’t as complete. The last straw was the poor traffic mapping. I live in a city where a wrong turn can cost me 30 minutes, so it’s become a necessity. Unfortunately, traffic maps depend on an active user base, so it’s a bit of a catch 22/chicken and the egg problem.
Check out Vela maps https://github.com/PimpinPumpkin/Vela
De-googled version of Google Maps
Thanks for the rec. I’ll keep an eye on it, but it looks a little sus being vibe coded among other things.
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
I couldn’t talk anyone into Matrix (Or Stoat or any of the others) but I somehow managed to get a Steam group chat sort of rolling instead of Discord, as most of the groups I played with had Steam accounts anyways so it was easy to jump on.
Not ideal, but its some progress?
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
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
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.
