I haven’t used it much if at all in the past year, but I finally took the last step and deleted it! Sorry if this is low effort I just don’t have anyone I know to share it with.
I have literally everything tied to gmail, no idea how to escape
It’s a slow process. Took me 2 and a half year to completely move away from Gmail. Worth it.
Why was it worth it? What benefits did you gain from the change?
I’m a simple man. Just knowing some entity is not munching my mail data is an enough reason for me.
That is quite simple. You’re the only one to provide a coherent answer so far so thanks for that.
I’m looking for a bit more info though. Did you get any other benefits besides the equivalent of warm fuzzies? Sounds like an extremely outsized cost/benefit assessment you had to confirm.
Well, while that’s the main reason, there are indeed some side benefits as well. I guess the first one that came to my mind is, I got rid of a lot of spams. Mostly because my Gmail address was in lots of breached websites. I also deleted any unnecessary accounts at variety of websites, because of these I haven’t been in a breach scandal since 2019 (That’s the year I finalized my transition to Tutanota). I use it on my government accounts, banking accounts and any other formal accounts, or the ones I trust. For the rest, I use email alias services and if I get a spam or even an annoying mail through that, I can just stop it there and I forget about them.
Also it’s not just warm fuzzies. Privacy is a basic human right and it should stay that way on the internet as well. So it’s nice to know to be freed of personalized ads hell, at least from the voluntarily part. Can’t really do anything for the involuntarily part besides GDPR. Big corporations getting our personal data is not different from someone watching my house with a binoculars, same level of creepiness. I don’t think any sane mind would be comfortable knowing this.
Is there a viable Photos alternative? I was thinking of setting up a NAS on my RPi but it would need to be for other family members too.
Another vote for Immich. It’s a really nice experience on both the web and app.
Ente it you’re looking for a paid service. (For me, photos are too important to self-host.) They’re end-to-end encrypted and both server and clients are open source.
I second Ente, absolutely awesome products and great Devs always listening to feedback from community. Unlike other services and products, absolutely everything is open source to 🙌
too important to self-host
For me it’s the other way round. My photos are too important to trust any corporation - no matter how trustworthy they say they are.
Do you do any hosting on the cloud? Thinking of cases like a fire or flood or something
No I follow the 3-2-1 rule which states that you should have 3 copies in 2 locations where 1 of them is remote.
In my case, the remote part is two external SSDs where I leave one with my parents and the other one plugged into my NAS which does automatic daily backups. When my parents come I swap them around.
TIL, thanks!
The Proton Drive app can automatically sync pictures from your phone. The Proton ecosystem as a whole is a good alternative to Google’s.
@mjq07
https://stingle.org, https://piwigo.org, and https://immich.app might be worth a look.I used NextCloud, myself.
@Blisterexe @degoogleI am still uploading to Google Photos currently, but have setup a backup of my photos once a week using SMBSync2 on Android, to my Raspberry Pi NAS. I have two external hard drives connected to my pc, so when I login to my pc there are two automated backups that happen to copy anything newly added to the nas to the two hard drives.
Next cloud all the way. I run it in my garage and I grab the free Android app from fdroid
Congrats dude! 😄 👍 I’m replacing all their service a bit at the time, is nice to see people able to completely switch off.
BTW How do you keep on syncing your calendars and stuff?
Idk I don’t have a calendar, but I hear nextcloud is great for that
I use nextcloud for all these google things.
Currently using murena.io as provider
