Ugh it’s going to be a pain to stop using Google, but it’s time. Long gone are the days of “don’t be evil”
Custom Android ROMs still have some viability, but it’s been getting harder to find ones without gapps these days.
There are other alternatives, I recently saw a really good one but I don’t remember it. Let me look for it and I’ll send it to you as soon as I find it, we use it at work
Water might be wet
They are, by they also might, but they are.
This has the same energy as “I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to, too”
And that’s why we self host.
One word: Immich
photoprism is another option.
Do it now while you can still buy a Pi and a hard drive for less than $500 each.
At this point ditch the PI and go straight to any used Mini-PC with 12th gen intel or 5000/7000 ryzen…
Moved the whole family to immich, deleted all our photos on Google. Not missed Google photos at all
“might”
Google won’t scan my private photos. Neither do I have Android (nor iOS) on my phone, nor do I use Gmail and certainly not Google Photos.
What do you use for your phone, out of curiosity?
Sailfish OS on my Jolla Phone 2026, fully natively. It is as “Nokia” as you can go today, given it is the successor of Meego, the last in-house Nokia OS, which was fully gesture based before iOS and Android. Nowadays it feels IMHO refreshingly clean, certainly different from the duopoly but also from other Linux phones.
How are the cell/4g/5g and standby times? Those are items that have kept me from going sailfish on my sony since forever.
Are they alright yet? I can live with things like subpar (or even no) camera, but not those 2
My phone is on 4G Volte all the time, it supposedly is capable of 5G but I have never seen it, others have. Not sure if that has something to do with my provider which is a budget one. I really don’t care enough about 5G to figure that out. What I have heard is that some phones show 5G even when they are currently actually using 4G because there is no need for the bandwith, while sailfish OS only showd it when it is actually used.
Regarding battery life, I cant really tell how long it survives on idle. I never have that phone idling for that long. The most recent system update did improve power consumption though, by fixing some background process cpu waste. At medium use battery holds 2 days.
Water is wet.
Always assume Google will scan whatever you store or access through them for advertisement targeting.
I would have to be crazy enough to use google photos for them to scan mine.
i assumed they already did that as they listen to us and obvs track everything we click or pause n look at
I kinda assumed it already did, so I stopped using Google photos, now it’s time to exit google drive as well. The only transition I think might be hard for me is Gmail and maybe Keep, but I’ll figure something out
For your email switch to literally any other provider that supports using your own domain. You bring the domain, they host it for you. You can change at any time based on whatever is the least evil.
Self hosting email is horrid. Well self hosting email is not that hard now with Stalwart and other servers in a box exist. But getting your email accepted by any remote server require a fair amount of work.
The best alternative I have found to Gmail is Fastmail. They now offer EU hosting. Proton would have been an option too but they’re losing the plot.
Fastmail is genuinely the best web client I’ve come across. I have to use Gmail for work so I know it well and compared to Fastmail it’s basically Slowmail.
For me keep is so specific and nobody else does it.
Checking the boxes of checkboxes only hides them while any other todo app just makes them a bit darker.
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I think they don’t care. At this point, it seems they’re injecting ads like AI, basically hand-in-hand.
They aren’t already?
I was about to move all my photos to Proton, and then… I guess it’s a vps and Immich after all that. Sheesh.
I have come to a similar conclusion, I think managed self hosting for certain services gives you the most control and privacy while still giving you all the benefits of an always on web service, and then I’ll make a home server from my old laptop for anything that needs to mostly run locally for even more control and zero cost
Another step is considering which things actually need to be an always on service, or how reachable it nerds to be. Reachability to limit Internet exposure, whether that’s pulling everything back behind VPN or just local/at home only. I was starting to look at which of those services even really need to be a service vs just some files on a NAS. Simple files and simple access not tied to apps that need troubleshooting, and probably lesser hardware requirement (compute/memory->power)
