Aaron Ogle has a couple of interesting posts on how and why he is degoogling his life. The why is just what you’d expect. He’s tired of having Google vacuum up all the data on his online activities. Like many of us, he understands the bargain you’re making when you adopt those “free” apps and like many of us he’s decided that the price isn’t worth it.
He’s also concerned about committing his workflow to software that may not be there tomorrow. That holds especially—as Irreal is always saying—to his data. As Ogle points out, a company could go out of business and take your data with it. For that reason, he tries use self-hosted services as much as possible and diversify among vendors for those services he can’t self-host.
Like most people trying to reduce their reliance on Google, Ogle replaced Google search with DuckDuckGo. At first, it didn’t seem as good as Google but he soon realized that that was because Google knew so much about him that it could guess what he was looking for better that DuckDuckGo, which doesn’t collect any data about your browsing. He also noticed that DuckDuckGo almost always had the result he was looking for on the first page.
Also like most people fleeing from Google, Ogle chose FireFox to replace Chrome. Unless you’re an Apple user and like Safari, that’s probably the best choice.
His choice to replace Gmail was the most unusual. He considered ProtonMail but decided to run his own server by running Mail-in-a-Box on a \(\$5\) a month DigitalOcean droplet. That’s a really attractive option—at least for me—because you’re running your own mail server and don’t have to depend on a third party who might not have your best interests at heart or who might collect and sell your data.
He’s replaced many other services as well so take a look at his posts to see what he used. Like the rest of us, he found YouTube really hard to replace and still hasn’t chosen an alternative. It’s not clear whether Ogle wants to replace YouTube as a consumer, a content provider, or both. Regardless, it’s a hard service to replace.