At any point, without warning, you may lose access to your Google account. Your emails, passwords, documents, photos, contacts, calendar - completely inaccessible. How many non-Google services are tied to your Google account? How many of your accounts rely on your Gmail? Do you really trust Google with the key to all this information? I definitely don't and it confuses me how anyone is comfortable with such a vast amount of sensitive and vital data in the hands of such a volatile company.

This is not a thought experiment! It has happened to people before, famously to the creator of Terraria:

Search Reddit for "Google account locked" and you will find many hundreds of posts from worried users who relied on their Google account more than they realised.

Because of this, I somewhat recently "ungoogled" myself, and I want to share to what extent I managed to replace their many services. This is not a guide, but I hope it at least convinces someone to make the same switch.

What to avoid

Google, obviously. But more fundamentally, I want to avoid relying too much on one single entity. Ideally this means I have one entity for each service, so that when one goes out, the rest of my stuff is untouched.

I also want to avoid too many subscriptions, especially since the Unity fiasco that taught me to expect the terms of service to change for the worse. And I like free stuff.

Capture! I have to avoid my data being in the hands of someone else. I want to be able to delete my account and still have access to my stuff, if applicable. Ideally I would self-host everything but that's impossible/impractical/unsafe. Still, I'll self-host what I can get away with.

Google Search

I use Kagi, a paid search engine. I said I would avoid subscriptions, but after having tried the free alternatives, Kagi's search result quality is worth it. I was afraid I'd miss out on useful Googly things such as the instant answer thing or the info panel, but Kagi has alternatives that I find even more helpful.

You can set up "personalised results", which allows you to apply different levels of priority to domains. I will never see Amazon or Pinterest results ever again, HN results are raised up, and Wikipedia results are pinned to the top. It may seem like a small thing but since I switched to Kagi, I haven't had to sift through dozens of pages to find what I'm looking for any longer.

Kagi has a "Quick Answer" feature that triggers when your query ends in a question mark (among other things). It invokes a language model that (seemingly) looks through the search results and gathers relevant information, and lists the sources it used at the bottom. This helps with the "hallucinations" that LLMs are infamous for, but doesn't entirely eliminate them. It more than suffices for simple questions that you want a quick answer to. I found this feature to be extremely useful, more so than Google's instant answer thing (or whatever it's called) that is invoked by unpredictable dark magic.

Google Chrome

Obviously Firefox. I don't have much to say here, it's simply better than Chrome. Firefox with uBlock Origin and Consent-O-Matic makes the web usable again. It's kind of ridiculous that I need all this shit just to be able to open a website and look at its contents, instead of being blasted with a load of alerts, ads, and consent forms.

The one complaint I have about Firefox is its history manager. It's unintuitive, and there's two of them (???). I wish it was more like Chrome's history page. This is not a deal breaker, though.

Especially now that the Android version supports these extensions as well, Firefox is the best browser on any platform.

Google Passwords

Bitwarden is free and open source! Never had any issues with it, especially on desktop. It's a bit finicky on mobile, especially iOS, but it's still more convenient than the alternatives.

I won't give you a detailed description of my security setup! Summarised: hardware keys, biometrics, desktop TOTP, self-hostable.

Chrome Remote Desktop

Chrome Remote Desktop has saved me multiple times. The ability to control my computer from my phone when I'm on the other side of the world is incredibly useful.

I use NoMachine, a free cross-platform remote desktop tool. It provides some support for external access but I don't use it. Instead, I use WireGuard to tunnel to my home network from anywhere. It's very secure, very fast, and uncomplicated.

YouTube

yt-dlp is great and I use it all the time, but it's no replacement for YouTube's user interface. There are a few projects out there that try to be a "privacy-focused" alternative front-end to YouTube, but they're all clunky, slow, or inconvenient. And even if they weren't, they still rely on YouTube. There is no true alternative.

Fortunately, YouTube isn't essential (to me, at least). The least I could do is set up a script to automatically download new videos from my subscriptions, but I haven't even done that because of how little it matters.

Gmail

Self-hosting email is known to be an absolute shitshow. This reputation, combined with how important email is for me has prevented me from even attempting it. Instead, I use a custom domain from a (once) reputable registrar and their email service. At this point I don't know which registrar to trust. Regardless, my current setup works perfectly fine despite the slight price increase.

Honestly I am not sure what the proper solution to this is. Email is scarily important. It's the main identifier across the internet and if someone has access to your email, everything else you have might as well be compromised. Let me know what your solution is in the comments below that don't exist and I won't ever implement.

Google Maps

There is no real alternative to Google Maps either. There's OpenStreetMap but it's missing so many useful features that I don't count it as an alternative. It's a good map tool, but it doesn't replace Google Maps. There are tools built on OpenStreetMap, such as Qwant Maps but they suffer from the same issue.

I don't leave the Netherlands very often. I generally know my way around 🚲 and use the Dutch Railways (NS) website to plan my trips. But even so, I use Google Maps for navigation when I have to.

Google Calendar

I host a Radicale (CalDAV) server on my local network. Once again I use WireGuard to access it from anywhere in the world. On my phone (Android) I use DAVx5 for synchronisation and a random calendar app from F-Droid to connect to it.

This setup is absolutely perfect. It's fast, simple, local, secure, and free*. I have zero complaints, but I use computers a lot. I can imagine how this is very unwelcoming and user-unfriendly to the average person. WireGuard? What the fuck is "F-Droid"? etc. I wish these things were easier to set up.

*DAVx5 is free and open source, but the Google Play (lol) version costs €6

Google Keep

Google Keep is less well known, but I used to use it to keep all of my notes. Now I use memos, a free open-source note taking server. I especially enjoy the Twitter-like interface, which ensures there's nothing between me and taking a note. I don't need to think about what to name the note, I simply start typing. The rest is lackluster, unfortunately. The API it so proudly talks about in its README.md is undocumented, and vaguely explained somewhere else in Mandarin (?). Notes are not stored in plain Markdown format, but instead kept in a convoluted database. Still, it beats Google Keep. I've been looking at SilverBullet, but I haven't made the switch yet.

As usual, everything is hosted locally and accessed externally through WireGuard.

Google Drive

I have Unraid installed on an older computer connected to a QNAP DAS. This is my NAS, on which I store all sorts of stuff that I need to access even when outside my home (through WireGuard again 🤍). My main computer routinely backs up to the NAS, which itself routinely backs up to a Backblaze B2 bucket.

I have encountered almost no issues so far. Even my Android phone can access network drives through its default file explorer. The only issue I have is trying to listen to music remotely. Android has issues with m3u8 playlists and VLC (the only player that can handle them afaik) suffers from random crashing when browsing SMB shares. I "solved" these issues with a little script that periodically reads my main m3u8 playlist and (intelligently) copies all the files to a separate directory. VLC has no issues playing a single directory. This does waste a little bit of space, but it's nothing significant.

Conclusion

The transition away from Google is going smoothly. I almost don't notice it, probably because I mess with computers all the time and setting all this shit up represents a relatively insignificant amount of time. I hope to find proper alternatives to Maps and mail (in general), and that one day YouTube will face proper competition. I have also learnt that I love WireGuard.

I highly recommend spending a little time to make sure Google can't fuck you over with a single notification.