Hirobenhito

Now that I have the motivation set, it’s time for the real deal. How do I actually do it?

Well at first, I needed to assess my lifestyle and decide whether or not deGoogling is really doable and more importantly, sustainable for me. Here are the lists of some of Big Tech products that I used and my level of dependence on them.

Google

• Gmail: Basically my whole being was tied to my gmail accounts. However I was confident that I could gradually transfer that into my new non-gmail email account if I really put an effort into it.
• Google Drive: I can’t remember the last time I used cloud storage, I don’t have the need to share files like I used to back in uni days. I store and backup my file in my external harddisks now.
• Chrome: My go to browser for no clear reason.
• Google Search Engine: My go to search engine just because it was already there.
• Google Maps: The best map service out there. I don’t think I can replace this one for now, but OpenStreet Map is promising.
• Youtube & YTmusic: Quite a chokehold. I used them extensively. However, I realized that sometimes I used them excessively.
• Google Workspace: Same as google drive, never used them that much lately.
• Playstore: I mean, it’s the gateway to obtain all of the apps I used on my android phone.
• Google Pixel: I bought used pixel phones last year, didn’t know google is a bitch so I gotta live with this one for a while. Ironically it turns out to be the easiest phone to deGoogle (It will be explained further in this article)

Microsoft

• Windows: Came pre-installed on my laptop, Nothing I can do about it.
• Microsoft Office: Widely used, hard to replace, but onlyoffice is promising.

META

• Whatsapp: Yeah I can’t move on from this one, all my boomers are in here.
• Facebook: My biggest chokehold is facebook marketplace, other than that I’m gucci.
• Instagram: I will miss sharing my life on my second IG’s close friend stories and get to know other people’s life updates, but I could easily live without it. Although sometimes I still go back to instagram when I have a relapse.

Others

• Twitter: Hard for sure. It’s overly toxic yet addictive.
• Line: Idk if Naver is considered a shitty Big Tech company or not, I just want to shit on it. Hate this app, it’s bloated, so many unnecessary features, but many people in my life and my worklife use it so yeah..

My conclusion after assessing my dependence level was that I am confident that I could move off of those environments quite easily. Although there will be some apps that I still have to keep.

How it went down

Installing and uninstalling apps were by far the easiest part of this journey and It only took me 1-2 days to complete. The part that required a herculean effort was to fully commit to the bit. It took me months before I could fully transfer from my previous environment to the new one mentally and also reducing my addiction on some of them.

Oh by the way, The future is FOSS (Free Open Source Software). It is a software available under a license that gives users the right to use, share, modify, and distribute the software. Imagine a community where the members contribute their time and energy to produce something that can be used freely by all people, even the ones outside their community. WELL, WELL, WELL, don’t look any further, there are many FOSS  alternatives out there for the paid softwares that we use, we just need to find the right one that suits our needs. I’ve said before that nothing is truly free right? So what do we pay for this FREE softwares? Extra effort to learn about them. I won’t sugarcoat it, sometimes it’s painstakingly confusing to begin with. That’s why I said, tech literacy is important. Also sometimes the quality of FOSS alternative is not as good as the big boy softwares used by enterprises. However, if you’re just a casual consumer, just use FOSS.

Email

One fundamental beginning for this journey was to find a new email service provider. There are a lot of options out there, the free ones and the paid ones. For the free option, people kept recommending Proton or Tuta. However, they don’t support IMAP/POP3 which in turn require you to install their apps instead of using a third party email client like Thunderbird or Fairmail. It’s not that flexible and also in my mind that would be the equivalent of escaping one asylum just to enter another one rightafter. It’s a no from me.

Finally I chose Posteo, it’s an email provider based in Germany. Posteo claims to be powered by green energy (I don’t give two shits about it). What I care about is the price of the service, only 1 euro per month. Another reason why I chose it was because i like the name “Posteo” 😀 This will be my personal email, and let me tell you, I have zero life management skill. I never used calendars, or any other email features. I use email just to email, although they provide those features. I was also interested in Mailbox.org, but again I chose posteo for a pure subjective reason, but maybe I would try Mailbox.org in the future because the pricing also starts at 1 euro. I used to use outlook for email client, but now I use thunderbird on linux and fairmail on my phone.

Browser

I use firefox as my main browser and DuckDuckGo (DDG) as my search engine. Both implement AI which I don’t like. Google is a major investor in firefox, hence why their default search engine is google. However, there are not many other alternatives out there, most of the browsers out there are based on chromium or a fork of firefox, so yeah. Unless you want to go to the extreme route of installing Dillo as your browser, just pick the best out of the worst. Maybe I will explore other firefox based browser which focuses more on privacy later.

Laptop Environment

I currently have 3 types of device in rotation: my laptop, my phones (I have 3, don’t ask me why), and my tablet. The first device that I tried to deGoogle was my laptop. I used windows as my main OS as it already came pre-installed, then I added linux to the mix. That was easy because I installed a second ssd into my laptop (Thankfully I bought one before it was being gatekept by the Global Elites for those stupid AI slop, fuck them AI). So I didn’t have to backup everything first. I just needed to install linux on that drive and slowly transfer all of my data from my other drive. The distro that I am using now is Fedora, it’s simple, reliable and it fits my needs. I used to experiment with ubuntu, debian, arch and mint, but Fedora is the one I choose to settle with for now. I am now genuinely repulsed every time I boot up my windows, like I wanna gag so bad. Luckily, the gaming days era is behind me, so I don’t really care about the performance of linux for gaming and how I haven’t installed the proprietary driver for my NVIDIA graphics card until now.

The other main concern is finding the replacement for Microsoft office, for now I am trying onlyoffice. So far it can fulfill all of my needs. That’s basically it for my laptop. I still keep a window installation in a virtual machine. I use it only if there’s no more alternative to the app that I need.

Smartphone Environment

Next is to deGoogle my smartphone. Yep I was a pixel fanboy, I just like the design and the camera, and I bought it second hand, so I also like the price. It has 7 years software support so why not. Oh boy, yeah whatever, luckily there is an OS developed by the community called GrapheneOS, it basically a custom ROM that uninstall everything that is on my phone and deGoogle it as best as it could. When I first boot it up, there was virtually nothing on my phone. I had to install every app manually. And the google play is also sandboxed so It doesn’t have the power that a normal google play has over privacy and your phone. It’s really convenient. One thing to note tho, because I have two pixel phones, I installed grapheneOS only on one of them and let the other one carry all of the shitty apps. However my plan is to gradually transfer to my grapheneOS, I do it this way to ease my way.

I installed signal messenger app. It’s a clone of whatsapp, but it’s owned by a non profit organization and it place a great deal of concerns on the privacy of its users. So far only three people joined, and only one of them use it religiously to talk to me.

Tablet

This is an interesting case because I have a samsung tablet. I didn’t fully send it and installed custom ROM due to my concern for the support of drawing and writing features. So the least I could do was removing all the bloatwares and all google services and apps with the help of ADB(Android Debug Bridge) and UAD (Universal Android Debloater). It only took me 15 minutes to set it up and be done with.

Video & Music Streaming

The biggest thing for me personally is moving away from Youtube and youtube music. I am an avid listener of podcasts and video essays. I sometimes indulge in them an unhealthy amount of times. To be honest, there are no replacement for youtube due to the unbelievable amount of videos it has, nothing compares. Knowing that I can’t get rid of it, now I am actively trying to reduce my dependence of it. No more watching youtube when eating, no more watching video essays mindlessly. I use youtube when I really need to use it.

For music, well.. I’m not a loyal user to any music streaming platforms. I have tried spotify, apple music and youtube music these past couple of years. I don’t curate music playlist religiously. I am a shuffle play kind of person. So I just downloaded a bunch of songs in my liked playlist on YTmusic with the help of a website which allows me to download .flac format for most of songs that I like, mostly sourced from tidal and qobuz. I play it offline using a music player of choice, which is gnome music on desktop and my lovely snowsky echo mini when I’m on the go. It’s pirating but it’s what it’s man, I can’t afford all those CDs.

Social Media

There’s nothing much you can do other than trying to minimize your addiction on social media. I uninstalled tiktok, twitter (although i still access it on browser), instagram (on and off). Sometimes my demons win, sometimes I win. It is what it is.

Afterwords

Maybe there were a lot of terms you are not familiar with in this article, but don’t worry, it’s just one search away from your fingertips.

You know what.. maybe the internet is slowly being taken away from us because nowadays people act like they don’t have access to internet. (Judging from the unbelievable amount of stupid questions they ask on the comment section of a post on social media).

REMEMBER!

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” -Unc Kurt

Don’t pretend to be a lazy dumbass. Educate yourself. AND DON’T USE AI TO SEARCH FOR SOMETHING U CAN EASILY FIND ON A SEARCH ENGINE. (Pro Tip: A random dude on reddit from 20 years ago probably already had a solution for your problem, word for word)

Future Plan

I want to have my own cloud storage for files, photo storage like google photos, my own music streaming service, and a web server. I will explain this in great details on the next part if I am able to get my hands on it. Maybe I will just explain the concept tho as an actual implementation requires me to spend some money and time. Right now I don’t have the latter, but because of AI gatekeeping all the resources, probably now I don’t have both. SHUCKS.