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've been running my own Nextcloud instance since 2020, which, combined with ProtonMail, has replaced basically everything I was using Google/Microsoft for
Didn't realize you could host your own, that's good to know
If you use docker it's super simple to setup. There's also a version optimized for the raspberry pi.
Nextcloud is amazing. File sync, contact, calendar, email, video & text chat, online office suite. Then add on apps!
Pretty much the only thing I miss is the magic Google did with calendar stuff from emails. Everything works very well in it's own lane, but google beats it with the integrations. It's those little things.
I get it though. Who is going to write and maintain systems to parse email for each email format? That's a lot of work. I would love a self-hosted "smart" email to calendar system. Does such a think exist?
Do you have an off-site backup?
Backups could definitely be improved--currently I keep a cold backup (USB hard drive) at my girlfriend's place, updated about once a month. I also keep the entire file storage and database synced to my laptop's (2 TB) SSD; not a backup, I know, but it does give me some peace of mind if my server (rockpro64) ever goes down. I'd love to add an additional hot backup via rsync, but unfortunately rent keeps getting in the way of a new hard drive :(
Nextcloud was a bit too heavy for my lightweight server last time i tried.
I have mine running on a raspberry pi 4 in a docker container next to my home assistant instance.
Getting the external storage to work on HASSOS was a bit of a bitch, but now that it’s working it’s rock solid.