De-googling my life: 6 years in

In this article I'll review my ongoing experiment using alternative software applications and services out of the well-known offer of Google, Microsoft and other big corporations. I'm writing while on a long train ride so I have all the time to indulge in a verbose prose.

Approximately 6 years ago, in what it seems almost another life, I decided to embark on a quest to free myself of most of the proprietary software I was still using, specifically Google products. The reasons were clear to me: data ownership, privacy concerns and a little bit of fun exploring an alternate world where megacorps were not ruling.

Being a Linux user since long time and avoiding closed operating systems is not enough anymore. Proprietary software has moved since long to the cloud. Choosing to use Audacity (for example) is not the same "revolution" it was 15 years ago.

It started as an experiment to see how far could I go without incomodating myself too much, I am not a FOSS maximalist, I need things that work not additional work for me so I am OK with using proprietary software if it is objectively way better than the FOSS offer. As it turns out I didn't need to compromise too much, FOSS software was already good enough for my use cases and the inconvenience so little that the switch was well worth it. Now I've become spoiled by a great FOSS choice, am a bit more picky and I think twice before using proprietary software at all. I wish the success and social acceptance that FOSS software have gained will set an example of sustainability for the future.

I'll list here the software I was using and what has replaced. I also will mention if I pay for that service/application, I'm curious to see how much my freedom costs :-) In the last years supporting FOSS projects has become an important factor of my choices and I hope the occasional reader will feel compelled to do the same. For me FOSS is "Free as in I am going to pay for your damn software so you don't have to sell my data". After all I work in FOSS too so I have a strong incentive to support the ecosystem that is feeding me.

§ Replacing Google services

So, a good 80% of the task was replacing Google services:

• Google search -> DuckDuckGo: I have found the switch pretty much painless. DDG was already good enough for me (pertinent search results and a simple user interface¹). DDG has improved over the years while Google at the same time declined its quality and has riddled search results with advertisement more and more invasive. I am not paying for DDG (I wish I could!) and I am a little nervous about their business model. For me the old adage "if you don't pay for a product ..." always stands and I am afraid that sooner or later it will turn its head to bite your hand. We'll see. In the last years new interesting projects are emerging in this field (for example: Kagi). I am keeping an eye on them to see what will stick. I don't think that "classic" search engines will be eclipsed anytime soon by the shiny toy of the day.

• Google Drive -> Nextcloud -> Proton Drive: Google Drive is just great. It's free (free as in we're going to choke the leash one day), works just fine and syncs great across devices. It was a sad day when I migrated to Nextcloud. Nextcloud worked pretty well for me, though the road was sometimes bumpy. I used it for a couple of years (I think 2018-2023), tolerating out of inertia upgrades that sometimes broke the server but in general it was OK, albeit slow. After a review of the Nextcloud parts I was actually using, at some point I decided to get rid of that big ball of PHP code and tried hard finding something comparable in terms of features and ease of use. Nothing significant in the FOSS world came out so I reluctantly ended up using Proton Drive, which works just fine and is included in the email service I already pay (see down below). For Proton I pay 48 EUR/year.

• Google Calendar/Contacts -> Nextcloud Calendar/Contacts -> SoGo: more or less as above, I left a proprietary service that worked fine to a moderately good FOSS option. After using Nextcloud for a couple of years, I switched to a FOSS option, SoGo, which I had no idea it even existed. SoGo seems to be one of the few WebDAV/WebCal FOSS solutions². I started using SoGo without even realizing what it was when I deployed the Mailcow orchestrated Docker containers so I don't have much to do. The client interface to this WebCAL/WebDAV server is a DAVx5 agent on the smartphone and it works just fine. The SoGo calendar web applications are not great, just good enough to not get mad. Being integrated in the Mailcow suite, I think I'll keep using it and tolerate its rough edges. In a way it's vendor lock-in all over again, this time I'm prisoner of a FOSS solution. The irony is not lost on me.

• Google Maps -> OSMap/Organic Maps: Google Maps is another service that is just great but also one that makes me extremely uncomfortable using. That's peak Google-heroin³. OpenStreetMap on the browser lacks many features but it's for me good enough. The user-interface could use some love but - hey - it's maintained by unpaid volunteers. After some searching on F-droid I found a great alternative to the mobile App: Organic Maps. Organic Maps is everything good from OpenStreetMap coupled with a simple and intuitive user interface. In addition, it's completely offline so it also works with just the GPS signal. I'm donating 10 EUR/mo to Organic Maps. Previously I've tried hard using another Android App, OsmAnd, but I was never able to get around its confusing user interface (last I tried was around 2 years ago).

Email service:

• Self-hosted + Proton Mail: I've been hosting my own email service (postfix + dovecot) for more than 10 years and while I always hated the archaic configuration of both, once they're setup you can forget about them (well, until the next time you need to change a little thing and you forgot everything). As already mentioned, today I use a dockerized setup (Mailcow) with zero configuration, I just need to update the Docker containers. I cringe everytime I look at that awful monster of Docker containers restarting but I don't want to go back to manually maintaining each of those services. For Mailcow I pay their monthly "SAL" license - which is a 15 EUR/month "thank you" ticket. Considering that Mailcow gives me mail server, spam control, calendar and contacts I cannot really complain.

  However, I learned the hard way what it means being bullied by big email providers (Microsoft and Google in the first place): even with a perfect DNS, SPIF and DKIM configuration that ticks all the checkboxes, nothing will save you from their opaque heuristics that will randomly and hopelessly land your emails in a spam folder. Aware of this stigma, I decided to also create an account by someone with a better reputation than my modest city17.xyz, for those cases where I cannot afford to be unsure if my email was delivered or not. Enter Protonmail. At the time it was already good but improved over the years (especially their web client at the beginning was rather clunky) and now I pay for the service. I like that they put customers and not customers' data at the core. This gives me hope that if their products are appreciated by a sufficient number of people, they have a sustainable business model.

  Recently (2023-2024) Protonmail started expanding their offer, adding new products to the Proton "suite". While I am a bit worried that they want to become another "everything SaaS", as long as they don't enshittify their current products, I'm fine with just using what I need. One new feature they recently added had me pause: the dreadful AI assistant when writing emails. I just keep it disabled and I am crossing fingers that they will just sunset it at some point.

  One notable feature missing is being able to access my mailbox through standard protocols, like POP3s and SMTPs (that is, POP3 and SMTP through TLS). In addition, their offering of end-to-end encrypted email communication is a bit spotty (due to a number of technical reasons that depends on needing to support these protocols). A few years ago they had to disclose some logs leading to the arrest of a French environmental activist. The news made waves in the privacy-concerned community, it seems that they received an international police subpoena and couldn't do anything else. Their pinky-promise is that emails are end-to-end encrypted by default between Proton users (between non-Proton users you have to manually load the public key of the recipient), so they can't read them even if they wanted. This claim has not yet been proven to be false as far as I know, but the private keys are stored server-side, so ... uhh ... depending on one's threat-level scenario, Proton Mail cannot be trusted.

Instant messaging mobile Apps, the bane of my life. I hate them all but of course you have to have them all because of the various intersecting social networks:

• Threema: Threema is a bit old-school and barebone compared to competing mobile Apps but it works ok. I appreciate that (and it is the only one) that does not require email or phone number to create an account. Some people have concerns because the server-side part of Threema is not FOSS but Threema GmbH seems to have always behaved well, I assume always to the extent they are allowed by the Suisse law. Besides security considerations, almost no one in my circles use it, so I have just a few contacts on Threema. How much does Threema cost? Here's a funny answer. I paid about 5 EUR for my license but I need to pay additional licenses for people I wanted to stay in contact using Threema. It's really dumb that people don't want to shell out 5 EUR for an App, this is an expectation people acquired due to the bad example set by Whatsapp or Telegram. In any case I don't understand how can they support their business with people paying one time for an App. Their network effect is basically zero. They offer a "Threema Work" business package but I have no idea how much they are making from it.

  All in all, Threema is a bit of failed experiment in this list and I am even thinking to ditch it and move these fistful of contacts to Signal.

• Signal: in my circles, this is the standard chat App used by virtually everyone. I try to use it sharing less data as possible (for example, I don't share my contact list so I must be careful when reinstalling it). They promise to keep no logs about anything (so they cannot satisfy subpoenas) and that contacts are stored encrypted on their servers. Contrary to Threema, they invest in communication and evangelism. I admit that Signal has a favorable image also because of this. I did a one-time donation (a sum correlated to how useful is Signal for me) but like for all the other chat Apps, I wonder how they support development and recurring costs with one-time payments.

• Telegram: in other circles I am in, this is unfortunately the standard. I have serious trust concerns about Telegram. I must be honest: I don't trust a Russian unencrypted mobile App with such a big userbase claiming to not snoop or hand chat logs to a dictatorial government. But I don't have a choice, unless I decide to severe a substantial chunk of my social life: the network effect decides for me. I didn't donate/pay anything because honestly I don't even know how one is supposed to do it (their business model is weird, the App is 100% free but they claim that additional paid features sustain the development). I want to believe in this claim, but if I look around me I highly doubt that anyone is actually paying anything.

• Matrix protocol: I self-host a Matrix server, just for my user. I started using it when it still was called "riot.im" (I loved that name!) but the end user experience is still far too complicated to compete with other mainstream messaging Apps. So I only have a couple of contacts there, all hardcore FOSS nerds. The server I am using (Synapse) is rock-solid. After the initial setup (which has very good documentation) I just update the Docker container and forget about it. Sometimes I look at the logs and sigh at the huge amount of traffic, federation has a cost that is not often advertised.

  The Matrix Foundation (or what it's called) is having serious funding problems but at the same time they are rushing to reach Matrix 2.0 and freeze the spec so all third party client can catch on with an ever changing spec. Android clients are not bad, but pale in comparison to Telegram or Signal (they're all FOSS and developed by unsung heroes). I chose to give 10 eur/month to the Fluffychat developer.

• Whatsapp: I stubbornly refuse to use it. In my (demographically young) circles it is understood that is absolutely not to be trusted so at least it's kept for purposes where privacy is not paramount. I understand I am lucky because for others is a must-have.

Other misc services:

• RSS: Feedly -> Nextcloud News -> miniflux/miniflutt: I am a RSS fan! I used to use Feedly and it was great. Then they started the obvious enshittification process and I dropped it for a "plugin" I could install in Nextcloud, a bit a hack but worked fine. I finally found solace in using a self-hosted instance of miniflux and the miniflutt Android App. These are small projects, I like them and I could even see myself contributing small patches.

• "Read-it-later": Pocket -> Wallabag: I was a fan of Pocket pre-acquisition from Mozilla! Then I dropped that because I didn't want to pay for suggestions and replaced it a self-hosted instance of Wallabag. It's a ball of PHP code, it's not super fast and a bit clunky but I can't complain. I now have a little more privacy and I don't pay a cent. But I should! I am not sure how many users does Mozilla Pocket have. Sometimes I think that Mozilla doesn't even care, given the questionable business choices they have been doing since years.

§ Notable missing

I stopped using Chrome and derivatives a few years ago and returned to Firefox (I was a very VERY early user of that codebase). I'd like to pay for it but I can't. Paying for one of their pitiful side dishes (Pocket, Send, Relay, VPN, etc.) is not for me a meaningful alternative. I relieve my conscience by supporting MDN with 5 EUR/month, it's really a good resource which I often use.

§ Conclusion

So, how much does my freedom cost? On a full year:

• VPS hosting, domain, DNS: about 163 EUR/year
• ProtonMail: 48 EUR/year
• Mailcow: 180 EUR/year
• Organic Maps: 120 EUR/year
• DAVx5: 120 EUR/year
• Fluffychat: 120 EUR/year

Total: about 750 EUR/year

Considering how many problems these software packages are solving for me, a little more than 60 EUR/month it's a steal (also, I get VAT refund for some of them). My time is at least an order of magnitude more expensive than that and the way I see it, I am just paying for the real cost of them. Please pay for your use of FOSS software. Pay what you can but pay. It's really important.

Maybe in 6 years I'll review this list again :)