#contentwarning #content-warning #cw #longpost #nsfw #idkWhichOfTheseWorkOnTheFediverse

There's been a bunch of articles lately on ditching the Big 5 - namely on Vice and Gizmodo, but also on a handful of fellow-minded blogs. That is, to not use Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google products (alternatively, FAANG is a thing but replaces Netflix with Microsoft. It is easier to avoid Netflix than to avoid Microsoft tho)

I've been feeling this way for several years, but my personal trajectory of this is a bit different. I (usually) don't want to give control of services to other companies, especially if I know how to do it myself. Of course the trick is to make these online services as reliable and pain-free as possible (lol).

I also have a different relationship to these companies that the average _consumer_. To wit I'd like to chronicle some of the ~adventure that ditching big internet companies has been like, and spotlight some alternatives or self-hosting options. As a sort of intro, here's my current starting place with the five, in a weighted order:

Apple: I've never bought or owned a single Apple product in my life. Actually, within my immediate family, I think only my brother owned an iPod for like a month before it was stolen. So yeah. Winz?

Facebook: I quit facebook back in 2012(ish), and permanently deleted the account some years ago. My social media use in general is sparse.
I do not use WhatsApp.
My VR of choice is the Vive. Steam has its own issues we'll get to eventually...
I have an instagram for a thing that I have posted to exactly once - it will probably serve as some kind of publicity at some point but I'd rather give it a go with pixelfed.
Also I am main-ing this self-hosted friendica atm as a social/blog/picture...thing.

Amazon: I permanently deleted my Amazon.com account in late 2017. No regrets. However... I have noticed that even some seemingly personal-seeming accounts on eBay have shipping fulfilled by Amazon. Buying direct from manufacturer or some distributors may also be fulfilled by Amazon. I also assume some purchases made in real life have Amazon involved at some level up the chain, considering just how DEEP the penetration is.
I also don't watch Twitch, nor buy Whole Foods since the acquisitions.
AWS is worthy of its own post, but it would probably devolve into spacey stoner-like rants. I'm trying to grow my skillset in OpenStack vs learning even more AWS lock-in nonsense.

Microsoft: I've been using various distros (starting with Red Hat) as my main desktop OS since 2002(ish), but M$ has been proding at me - about 8 years ago I build a gaming desktop and at some point in the last 4 relented and actually bought a Win10 license for games - specifically VR. I don't really believe I "own" this OS, but it is installed. I just keep it tucked away in the grub just in case I want to play a game that super doesn't work on my main linux install.
I never really used my github account, and either way I'm trying to be active on gitlab and my own gitea.
No azure use, no office365, no outlook/hotmail/msn/???, no xbox.
I do have a LinkedIn for capitalism purposes, and I hate it so much. I filter its emails and check it roughly once a month, where I usually find that the cool recruiters messaged me 3 weeks ago, and today a fintech company feels like I'd be a great value-add for them.

Google: This one is the toughest. Like many, I was a Google fanboy once upon a time. I mean, hey, it was THE open source smartphone option. Then reality set in, and I'm only somewhat in the process of getting away from Google... not entirely sure how possible it will be. To date I've made these replacements:
tinytinyRSS for Reader
searX for search {plugs into all the engines, including startpage, which plugs into Google. so... cheating? yacy kinda sucks to use rn}
protonmail for mail (really the only thing I'm fine with leaving un-self-hosted atm.)
nextcloud for drive, cal, pics upload, location tracking, notes,
rocketchat for chat

This is really where this series is going to start I suppose. I have some tentative plans for ditching BigInternet, but Google is clearly going to have to be the main focus to start.

Android: My main phone is an LG G6, a peculiar variant that does not have root. Root may be on the horizon, so that I may try LineageOS with no gapps. I mean, the Librem 5 is on the horizon but I also do not exactly want to buy a brand-new phone model, for environmental reasons, so I'll try to squeeze as much life out of the G6 as I can.

Google Maps: The alternatives are wanting, but mapkeep has incredible promise for the desktop. On my phone, I started trying out OSMand. It's OK, but not the most ideal. I still find myself looking at GMaps from time to time.

Google Voice: This will be a series of posts; I'm sure of it. I actually transferred my main historical number to Google so many years ago. Best idea I have right now is to transfer my number to a gateway provider and self-host like FusionPBX? I do not look super forward to that process but I'm sure there will be lots of lern. It is handy to know how to do VOIP things

YouTube: I use RSS feeds to keep track of my "subscriptions", but I do keep my ded google account to actually sub to the accounts I really believe in. I use invidious on my laptop to de-googlify content, but like all(?) 3rd party youtube apps, resolution is limited to 720p, and it's also not 100% effective. I could download videos at full res, but that's an extra step. So right now, I don't have a better alternative to play 1080p yt videos in my living room than to just watch from youtube itself.

So yesss. Next post will probably be either regarding Android or GVoice, depending~