For me its probably deleting all my social medias, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc
My migration to Firefox and starting to use uBlock, definitely the best decisions I've made.
Replacing Google services with selfhosted or privacy preserving cloud solutions. The biggest one of those was probably switching to Firefox with selfhosted sync server.
An interesting one! A few questions, if you don't mind:
- Is it worth it (compared to not syncing)?
- Is the account server self-hosted as well?
Sure no problem
- Definitely. I have a bunch of devices with FF installed, so syncing them makes things much easier, and because it's selfhosted my data stays with me. Although just using Mozilla servers is pretty safe as well, because sync is e2e encrypted. That's not the case for Google sync, so switching from Chrome is the important part.
- You can do that, but afaik it's quite a bit more involved and not really worth it for me. I have a Mozilla account anyway, and the account server doesn't store any more personal data if you use it for syncing. But if you don't want a Mozilla account then it might be a good option.
Phasing out my Google usage.
I didn't really use Facebook, Twitter other "big tech" shite, so those would have been on the list to phase out too.
I used to use Google for everything (documents, notes, email, photos, videos, passwords, browser, phone) but the only remaining hard dependency I have on Google is YouTube.
I do everything I can to avoid giving Google useful data here but it's sadly still a lot and I'm still at the whims of the tech giant on whether that remains a possibility. The only reason youtube-dl, Piped, Newpipe, SmartTubeNext etc. still exist is that Google hasn't thrown significant money towards blocking them yet.If I want to see something interesting, Nebula has me like 40% covered nowadays, so that has been pretty decent but I don't see YouTube going away as the prime entertainment and learning platform any time soon as there aren't any real competitors in the indie video publishing business. :/
Getting a functional nextcloud server. I self-hosted mine, but there's lots of VPS options that are pretty easy to set up.
It's basically a drop in replacement for the majority of proprietary productivity suites (i.e. Google drive, onedrive and icloud). One service covers a lot of bases.
I installed Linux on our family PC when I was in high school since it was sluggish running Windows. That's what got me into the world of tech in general. I got interested in FOSS, and privacy was of course part of the ethos.
I used WhatsApp more than any app om my phone this time last year. I still use Discord but at least I'm beginning to move towards Signal and Matrix.
