For me it’s Whatsapp. Like 99% of people i know use it so yeh… i still need it. I am considering moving the Whatsapp Gdrive backup to a local backup btw.
Google photos is also a major problem for us. We have a lot of stuff that want to migrate to different service (or store locally).
I still have a Google account (down from four). But in the past, I used this for literally EVERYTHING ; now I only use it for a couple of incoming, remaining emails. Posteo is my email and calendar today. That’s a big step already. Same with google maps: ive switched to other European providers, but occasionally i may still use Google Maps. I canceled Meta completely, no more FB, IG or WhatsApp; instead I use the fediverse alternatives, and SMS or signal for messaging. Lemmy instead of Reddit. I use a hard drive for storing files; I have nothing anymore in a Cloud, but sometimes colleagues force me to use Google Drive. Overall I’m pleased; Perhaps it’s not about canceling everything consistently, but a 95% reduction is a good initial achievement.
My friends and I all use Facebook’s messenger as our group chat and Discord for voice calls while gaming. That group chat is literally the only reason why I haven’t deleted my Facebook account yet. I have a Matrix space ready and have convinced a couple of people to make accounts and join the space, but it is just not being used at all. I was actually hoping someone was going to need to provide an ID to log into their discord account as that would most likely be the final push that moved everyone from messenger and discord over to Matrix, but so far it hasn’t happened and the Matrix space sits vacant
Deleting facebook is tricky in sooo many ways. From a tech view, it is so hard to find a “Delete account” button. You literally need to dig through random places to find it.
From a consumer view, it is very hard to truly delete it. Notice how facebook gave you a time limit in case you change your mind?
I know it’s basically impossible to make them delete the data they already have on me, I really just want to stop using their service
I couldn’t talk anyone into Matrix (Or Stoat or any of the others) but I somehow managed to get a Steam group chat sort of rolling instead of Discord, as most of the groups I played with had Steam accounts anyways so it was easy to jump on.
Not ideal, but its some progress?
For photos I’ve been using immich and I’m a fan. I’ve heard decent things about Ente photo too.
I’ve gotten to the point of finding a balance of using multiple platforms. Originally I wanted to stop using Gmail entirely because it was involved in so many data breaches the spam it gets is insane. So I’ve gotten most of my email switched over to another platform with aliasing for each address I use so I don’t have to worry about data breaches anymore. I still have my Google account and Gmail and use them both (especially for YouTube) but I use it a lot less for my email now at least and have a platform to fall back on if needed.
I moved away years ago, the hardest thing is changing your email on every website. It takes awhile.
Sometimes it’s impossible too. I had some badly designed services where it’s just completely impossible to change email, even with contacting their support team. Email forwarding rules are really good here, but they get confused if you reply with a different email address than they sent to
My vet and my doctors office are like this. Everything for my doctors office says my new email everywhere. Even in the 2FA section. Need to log in with 2FA? Straight to the gmail! No option for an authenticator app either.
14 years on Linux, 2 years with a graphene phone, no google play apps at all.
Replacing Gmail with posteo.com took the longest, adjusting everything per website, and testing, One drive has been replaced by https://filen.io/
A happy user again with control of everything.
I’m still working to get rid of google, I’m worried there’s no way to transfer all my photos from google photos and I still use the tasks app and calendar.
For the things I did switch, I found a suite of apps under the name Fossify which I use for my gallery, phone app and file manager.
I got rid of Google easily. Unfortunately, I still have to use their Messages app for Rcs, and Youtube. But replaced all the other products.
I still use Whatsapp because it’s the only messaging app that the people I know use, other that telegram and I hate telegram even more.
Luckily whatsapp is available outside of google play, it can be dowloaded from the whatsapp site, it is a bit hidden but the apk is there to download.
I just went to Immich for my Google photos replacement. I’ve heard good things about Ente photos as well.
It didn’t take too long to get away from google. I had my first google mail account only for registering my first Android phone. It has never been my main email address and I was always annoyed by this “log in with google”, so I never used that. In return I had almost no services connected to my google mail.
Then I just flashed LineageOS and created a mail address at mailbox.org. After that, I quit Facebook, Instagram one after another, but I haven’t used those services in a while.
The hardest was leaving WhatsApp, but I now have my whole friend circle and my 80+ parents on signal, so that’s great!All in all it was a process over multiple years, as I had to learn a lot of things. But I left early enough to not get involved with the modern shit. Nowadays I flash phones for friends, running some self hosted stuff such as Jellyfin as a side hobby.
I finally ditched Windows 2 years ago, I was always afraid I could play video games anymore. But oh boy I was wrong, Linux Mint is a beast.
I’ve been with Posteo almost a decade, that part was pretty easy. I remember downloading everything from Google Drive was pretty easy back then as well.
Then I used stock android until maybe a year ago when my phone was too old to get updates and too old to be supported by my banks app so I migrated to LineageOS.
The messaging app landscape is kind of a mess, so I use SMS/MMS BC as you’ve noted the landscape is fragmented at best.
I solved file storage with AlainKnaff/Android-SFTP-Documents-Provider which just SFTPs into my desktop at home.
Still on android and youtube unfortunately,
Shout out to Freetube as an ad-free YT front-end replacement
Desktop: https://freetubeapp.io/#download
Android: https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/io.freetubeapp.freetube
The huge almost-unavoidable one is gmail. You might use a different email provider yourself, but whenever you email another person, there’s a high chance that they are a gmail user. So whatever you wrote lands on a gmail server and stays there forever. Someday the entire contents of those servers will be crunched through an AI to identify and round up the undesirables.
Other than that, I confess to using google maps for road navigation pretty regularly. I tried to switch to Organic Maps but it just doesn’t work anywhere near as well. Also I watch a lot of youtube, though without having an account on it.
I don’t use gdrive or whatever. I don’t have a google account. I switched from google photos to fossify gallery a while back but (mostly from laziness) I still haven’t degoogled a few of the other stock android apps, that hopefully don’t upload anything. And yeah, I’m still on android itself. I don’t use any google play apps though. Just f-droid.
Google Maps is still more complete than Open Street Maps, although the temptation to just DISBALE Google Maps and worry about the fallout of that later is still there.
You might have then noticed that the biggest Google dependency I have is Android. Yeah, that will be a hard sell. I don’t have easy access to any Linux phones either - although Linux now has a slop problem and it’s as deep as the kernel. Ugh.
