It has been almost one year since I started moving away from Google as much as I could. In this post, I’ll summarise some of my experience of how things are going after one year.
Overview
Firstly, how did it go overall? Well, I am very happy to have been using some brilliant non-Google products. I now have a peace of mind whenever I go about with my digital life. The Big Brother ain’t watching.
At the same time, I failed to remove some Google products from my daily life. They are hard to replace mainly due to the lack of viable alternatives, but it’s work in progress.
Nextcloud – My Digital Home
The best thing I did in degoogling was to set up my own private Nextcloud instance online, with the help of Cloudron and Digital Ocean. It is central to all my files and photos, and I can access and share the files from both my mobile and desktop devices.
Nextcloud is basically Google Drive, but without the bells and whistles. I store and edit all my files with Nextcloud: whether they are word documents, markdowns, PDFs, simple text files or spreadsheets.
I also installed and setup the Nextcloud Android app so that all my videos and photos are automatically synced to the cloud! It has been working very well; the app is stable and everything works like charm. It also comes with a number of plugins, and I use one such plugin as my to-do list.
Overall, I’m extremely happy with Nextcloud. It will be the centre of my digital life for a long time to come.
Hmm… interestingly all the logos are blue!?
Pros
- Secure and private.
- Intuitive to use.
- Convenient: all files are accessible from both desktop and mobile devices.
- Files are editable across devices.
- Syncing works seamlessly across devices.
- Nextcloud comes with a number of plugins.
Cons
- Some setup are required to get Nextcloud going, including making files editable.
- The look-and-feel and user experience (i.e. UI and UX) are not as polished as Google Drive.
How I Setup Nextcloud
Previously I wrote a step-by-step post on how I set up my own private Nextcloud. Essentially it involves:
- Getting a domain
- Setting up a virtual machine in Digital Ocean.
- Using Cloudron to let it install and configure Nextcloud easily.
The post was written close to one year ago, so the details would have probably changed, but the idea should remain the same.
Backup of Files?
With Google Drive, you can trust Google’s gazillion-dollar infrastructure to have your files safely backed-up. With my own self-hosted Nextcloud instance, I need to setup my own ways of backing up files. This is where the online service Sync comes in: all files stored with Sync are secured with end-to-end encryption, and is reasonably priced. So I use Sync on a regularly to backup my Nextcloud files.
Emails
Email is central to my personal data. I considered hosting my own email servers, but I decided to go with a third-party email service to have my emails encrypted.
I found Protonmail and Tutanota, two of the best encrypted email service providers. It was a close call as to which one I’d to use as my main email service. In the end, I settled with Tutanota. I use Protonmail for other usages. It was just that Tutanota is slightly cheaper, more trustworthy since it is open source, and I get more email aliases to use.
I enjoy using both email services. Both are big on privacy (obviously!), ethical, and have great communities behind them.
One important thing to note, particularly for power users who need more advanced email functionalities, is that with encrypted email services, some functionalities are inherently limited, due to the nature of encryption. For example, searching through emails on Tutanota requires emails to be processed first (which might take a couple of minutes depending on how many emails you want to search for). Because of this, I proactively delete emails that I know I won’t need ever again (e.g. confirmation and reminder emails), so there are fewer emails to search for.
I also use the Tutanota built-in Calendar as my mail calendar. It was a close call between it and the Nextcloud calendar. I settled with Tutanota Calendar as it has slightly better UI and UX.
Gmail Backup
My aim is to eventually close off all my active Gmail accounts. But I want to keep them backed up somewhere privately and securely, so I don’t lose years of emails. And I want them to be accessible online, so I can instantly search for emails whenever I need to. So how could I do this?
Well, I am using the brilliant Cloudron service to setup my own email accounts on my own domain. Then, on a regular basis, I use Mozilla Thunderbird to backup my active Gmail accounts to my own email addresses (these Cloudron email addresses are only used for backup purposes).
Cloudron can install a fully functional email server painlessly. With it, I setup several private email addresses, all with my own domain names. For example, I have:
email_1@mydomain.com
email_2@mydomain.com
Each of these matches to my Gmail addresses:
email_1@gmail.com
email_2@gmail.com
Then, I use Thunderbird to connect my own emails and Gmail addresses. Emails are copied from my Gmail accounts to the corresponding private emails addresses. Voilà! My Gmail accounts are backed up privately, and I can also search for emails from any devices. As a bonus, I use Sogo (installed with Cloudron) as the email app. It is a beautiful and intuitive app to use.
Search Engines
I use different search engines, depending on the actual search results, and what I feel like to use at that time. I tend to use DuckDuckGo more, but I also mix with Qwant and Startpage. Recently I’m starting to use Startpage more and more, and it might take over as my main search engine. Startpage has the following advantages:
- It understands the use of hyphen to exclude words in the search.
- I prefer the paginated results (i.e. results are separated into different pages), easier to remember where a particular result is.
- As a software developer, I find the search results appear to be slightly better than other search engines.
Browsers
I use a number of browsers on my desktop environments – because why do we need to stick to only one particular browser? Currently, I use Firefox more than the others, followed by Brave and even Tor. There is no hard and fast rule on which browser to use for what, it just depends on what I am doing at that point in time and what I feel like to use. For example, as a developer, I tend to use Brave for debugging, because I’m familiar with its debugging tools, but I switch to Firefox when I need some better debugging functionalities.
What I Failed
Many Google products dominate the digital world is because they are simply superior in functionality, and incredibly convenient to use. And some Google products just don’t have many competitions. YouTube and Android phones are two primary examples, and to date, I have not been able to degoogle these.
YouTube
Why YouTube is hard to replace is this: this is a social platform, as opposite to a tool like Gmail or Google Maps. YouTube has numerous content, created from individuals to big corporations. To replace YouTube, both the content creators and viewers would need to gradually start moving to other products such as LBRY, which isn’t easy. Let’s hope more people (myself included) and content creators will start to use other YouTube alternatives more and more, so we can have a genuine YouTube alternative to use.
Android Phones
I use a Google Pixels phone, and it is not easy to replace, since the only other real viable alternative is the Apple iPhones. There are some alternative phones and mobile phone operating systems around, such as Pine Phone, CalyxOS and Graphene OS, but either they require some manual setups, or are still very fringe and not mature enough for the general population. Let’s keep an eye in this space though, and I am hoping to migrate to one such phone soon.
Summary
I’m very happy that I got the central pieces sorted and have been using them with joy and peace of mind:
- My files are private and secure with Nextcloud.
- My emails are encrypted with Tutanota.
The next important thing is to find a degoogled phone. There appears to be more awareness and movements on using degoogled phone, so hopefully I will find a suitable one soon.