Getting rid of google: The *really* easy stuff and why I may have wrote my previous post a bit too fast

So I haven't updated in a bit, but I still wanted to start things off by finishing my series of posts on getting rid of google and reduce internet surveillance.

Here, I'll discuss hoping out of Youtube (well, more or less) and Gmail and explain where I really was too hasty last time, before giving some first thoughts on it all.

Step 1: Youtube

Most of the content I consume comes from Youtube, which is so present that totally avoiding it is currently near impossible.

My main goal though remains to reduce surveillance, so the best course of action is to stop using my Youtube account.

This comes with one big drawback: loosing my subscription list. Or does it really ?

Indeed, in case you didn't know, Youtube subs are in fact simply RSS feeds, and as such a simple RSS reader can replace them.

That's what I did for a while, and it worked, but it had the issue of only displaying video names with a small channel name next to it, which isn't practical to me as I mainly spot the videos I'm interested in by their miniatures.

Thankfully, dedicated options exist, and as such I ended up settling for Freetube on my computer and NewPipe on my phone.

Both works roughly the same, basically they're just RSS feed reader dedicated to youtube, with integrated video players and which basically imitate Youtube's look.

One of their biggest advantage is also one of the biggest usability drawback: they don't use an account system and instead store your subscription list locally. this means that you need to keep a backup of your sub list if you want to be sure to not lose it and also that whenever you want to sub to a new channel, you have to do it manually on both platforms.

In my case, the benefit far outweight the cost and that's a solution that worked tremendously for me so far.

Step 2: mail

Mails have been really straight-forward: I switched to tutanota, and simply have to switch my e-mail address from different services or websites from time to time.

The biggest drawback of switching mail provider is that you generally have to pay a subscription to fully take advantage of them, I found tutanota's "mix n match" approach to be the most fitting for me and that's the reason why I went with this instead of Proton (which is still interesting but was a bit too pricey for me)

Step 3 ?: What I got wrong last time

So after more rigorous use of Metager and Mojeek, the former weirdly never bring out quite the results I search for, and I often end up going back to either DDG or Qwant to finally get the results I was looking for.

This is kind of frustrating and is a reminder of the difficulties of getting rid of internet surveillance sometimes in the weirdest ways.

There's one option I haven't been able to explore though: SearX, this seems like the best option but only if it's self hosted and as of now I don't have the means to do so. Maybe I'll talk about it here if one day I set up my own instance.

Conclusions

I'm sure that I'm missing a lot of elements to really get rid even more of Google and GAFAMs in general, but I've been surprised by how quickly and how easy it was for me to basicaly reduce by at least 95% my usage of Google and its services.

All of these steps, however, comes with drawbacks, and it's a stark reminder that what allowed Google (and many similar companies) to gain so much power was to offer comfort and ease of use to everyday people right as the internet became prevalent: simplicity is always the most interesting option to most people.

So now that I'm done with this series, what will come next here ?

Simply put I'll mostly talk about projects I may have, mainly software related ones, as well as things that I find interesting in general.

I'll probably talk about Esoteric programming languages as they're something that I feel isn't talked a lot about yet is profoundly interesting in regards to how we percieve programmation.

Until then, I've been Taewyth, thanks for reading my log!