We're reaching the end of an era wherein billions of dollars of investor money was shovelled into tech startups to build large user-bases, and now those companies (now monoliths) are beginning to constrict their user-bases and squeeze for every single penny they can possibly extract. Fair or not.
Now more than ever, it's important for us to step back and reconsider whether we want to be billboards for these companies anymore.
For anyone unfamiliar, some good resources to have when starting your degoogling journey are below:
Privacy Guides - A list of privacy-respecting services you can use.
Plexus - A crowdsourced information bank of service compatibility with degoogled devices.
This random PDF - A study from 2018 detailing data that Google tracks about its' users.
I used to rely almost exclusively on Google for almost anything online. Fortunately, I'm much less dependent on Google and their services now. I'm even self-hosting some of my own services nowadays!
Every single one of these apps/services used to be provided by google, so I think it's safe to say I've come a long way!
Of course, things could be better. I still use Google Contacts for synchronizing my, hum, contacts. I also use YouTube quite a bit, but as a paying customer my experience with it is just fine. I also use gboard on my phone — for bilingual speakers there's just no good alternative, imho. And, finally, I download/update most of my phone apps through Google Play.
For your keyboard, have you tried openboard? You can switch between languages with the space bar.
I did. Unfortunately, it doesn't have some of the features I use on a daily basis, like a multilingual mode (no need to switch between languages) and swipetyping.
It'd be nice to have a FOSS phone with a physical keyboard. Then I wouldn't need swipe typing.
for Google play, try aurora store
How do you host nextcloud? At home or on a vps?
Did you have any self hosting experience before doing that?
Do you know Logseq? It's an OpenSource/FOSS alternative to obsidian
On a VPS. Later down the road I intend to build my own home server, but that will take some time and money. A VPS is not ideal, but that's leagues above trusting Google and the likes, and so far it has been working well enough for me.
None at all.
I did try it, and it's a cool project, but not as good as Obsidian, imho.
Thanks for the reply. How did you learn about self hosting nextcloud? May I ask what's the pricetag for a vps for nextcloud? Are you using a preconfigured is from nextcloud?
I used this guide: https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one/blob/main/reverse-proxy.md
I also had the help of a webdev friend of mine, that taught me the basics of how to setup and use Docker.
I hired my VPS for around $200 a year (after comverting from Brazilian Reais to American Dollars). It gives me a VPS with 2 vcores, 2GB RAM and 40 GB SSD. There are many VPS providers that can offer you somthing with similar specs and and prices, like Hostinger, AWS and the likes. (Depending on where you live, you may actually find much better prices)