Technology

I've learned the hard way to never use a new Google product, no matter how good they make it look.

When they killed Google Reader it was rough, and I only recently started getting back into rss feeds after setting up a self-hosted FreshRSS instance. After spending over a year convincing most of my extended family members to switch to Allo from their default SMS app for texting, it was a real gut punch when Google rugpulled it within several months of them really getting into it. They tried really hard to get me off Hangouts into Duo for calling, but I resisted all the way until they killed Hangouts too. Play Music was an excellent streaming service with a good library and I was happy subscriber. They also spoiled me with the "Free Song of the Day/Week" promos. The YouTube Music app to this day doesn't have half the features Play Music app used to have. The Stadia fiasco wasn't too bad because I got full refunds for all the controllers and games I bought on it.

It's no longer a mystery which services they want to ditch. Basically anything that doesn't make them a ton of money directly with paid subscriptions will be on the chopping block sooner or later. Even the ad-supported stuff is there only to annoy us into the paid tiers. I weep for the time they will eventually kill off Google Voice for good, or enshittify the free tiers of things like Photos, Gmail, Android, Classroom, Calendar, etc.

For me personally though, the biggest punch in the gut was when they killed Cloud Print in the middle of the fucking pandemic lockdowns, when my kids who were both doing school remotely needed to print a metric shit-ton of stuff. Worst of all, there was no warning about this, just a blurb on the cloud print site that nobody ever visited after the initial printer setup.

This latest "fuck you" was the last straw for me to begin degoogling my life. They made the web hosting decision easy for me when they sold Google Domains to Squarespace. My photos are now backed up to a self-hosted Synology Moments instead of Google Photos. I threw away the OnHub and replaced it with TP-Link Omada access points with a self-hosted Omada Software Controller. When they killed both Duo and Hangouts, I finally set up a self-hosted Jitsi server for video calling. I'm slowly replacing the digital content that I've bought over the years on their various services (e.g. Play Books, Play Music) with "archived" (wink-wink) DRM-free versions that I self-host (Readarr/AudioAnchor, Navidrome/DSub). The only three of their services that I can't seem to kick are Gmail, YouTube, and Android. Email will happen eventually, for my phone GrapheneOS sounds better and better every day, but nothing can beat the content library they've built up on YT.