So this last April Reddit announced it would start charging for use of their APIs. This caused a bit of a kerfuffle, and it made me think. I’ve been trying to de-Google my life for some time now, how’s about I take it up a notch and try to de-Reddit my life as well? The goal: to become more conscious of the software and platforms I use, and of how they impact my life. So while we’re at it I might as well research digital and social media hygiene and think about implementing its best practices.
Lofty goals, but as de-Googling (and training for marathons come to think of it) thought me: slow but steady wins the race. Daily small incremental changes can snowball into big life-altering shifts.
So this post will be an overview of topics so I can keep track of what I want to figure out, what I have figured out and how (and if) I want to implement something. I will probably want to revisit this list at a later time, but let’s figure out how that works when we get there.
Chapter 1 – de-Google
I always liked Google’s “Don’t be evil.” motto. To me it really embodied the positive side of the early Silicon Valley “hacker” attitude. So when they removed it from their code of conduct in 2018 that was a chilling portent of things to come. Over the years I had happily strung myself up in the garland of Google’s infrastructure, but by 2019 those started looking more and more like a noose.
To eventually start the actual process of dismantling my Googlified life, I used this great Lifehacker article by Brendan Hesse. Getting my data out and and browsing around looking for alternatives felt great, but as Hesse says: “Our goal is decentralization.” so going back to another (albeit smaller and more privacy-focused) company to park all of my data felt … wrong. So instead I decided to kick it old-school and go back to the setup I had in 1999. And now you know one part of where the title for this project came from 😉 .
What is that setup you ask? Paying for a hosted website and e-mail of course! Luckily I already had a site with a blog on it (this one ;)) so that made things pretty easy. And with platforms like Nextcloud (not a sponsor) you can have a G-Suite/Google Workspace like environment all to your self. So let’s make a tally to close out chapter 1:
- Gmail > Mailserver at a ‘local’ hoster
- Calendar > Nextcloud
- Contacts > Nextcloud
- Drive > Nextcloud
As for the future: part of me still wants to try and self-host Nextcloud, so look forward to those posts. And one big holdover from my Google account: my YouTube account. Will I manage to ever get rid of that? Stay tuned!
Having disentangled myself form Google’s web, it was time to take a look at my digital and social media habits in the next chapter: Chapter 2 – Digital Hygiene.
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