> By 31-Dec-2025, you should be in the situation where you are not even inconvenienced if Google or Apple or Meta were to suddenly ban your account.
Have you done this for yourself? What was your process?
Have you done this for yourself? What was your process?
I've used https://www.fastmail.com for a great deal of years now, which is also home to my calendar as well so there's nothing much of value tied to my Google account.
YouTube subscriptions would be annoying to lose but I subscribe to channels via RSS. At the moment, I'm using http://newsblur.com for that but sometimes I jump around RSS clients. Newsblur recently added backfilling of channel content from YouTube's API beyond what RSS feeds normally surface though which is great.
For plain text notes, everything is in https://obsidian.md compared to say; Apple Notes
One thing I would miss is photos which I currently have in Apple Photos stored in the cloud so I recently set up https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do... which runs nightly on a mac mini at my house and archives everything in a Backblaze B2 bucket. https://ente.io/ seems like a promising alternative in this space.
I don't actually have a good alternative to Apple Health now that I think of it. You can export backups but not automatically. I'm not entirely sure what format a lot of that data is even in.
Realistically, I don't look at it a lot, I just use some of the correlations when they rarely pop up. Something like https://exist.io/ is probably the closest that I actually used to (aspire to) get value out of but don't currently use.
The reality is that convenience is king and it's hard work staying independent from any centralised service, not to mention social pressures.
The middle ground I've accepted is still using it all but making sure you have a good escape hatch you periodically test + backups where you're solely reliant on large businesses who heavily lean on automated account banning.
Most important was taking back my own E-mail and not relying on someone else for it. This took three steps: 1. Get my own domain (this I did over a decade ago), 2. point the MX record to my own VPS and start by simply forwarding to/from Gmail, 3. Actually hosting delivery and serving myself (I use exim4 for delivery and dovecot for IMAP, but there are many other ways to self-host). This can be easily moved to a different host if my VPS provider decides to get rid of me. In theory I can host it on bare metal at home, although I admit I have not actually tried it to verify I can. I'm only dependent on my DNS registrar, which is a bummer but AFAIK unavoidable.
For social media, that was incredibly easy: I last used Facebook over 10 years ago, LinkedIn over 5 years ago, and don't have any other accounts, so I've been off S.M. pretty much forever.
For photos and media, I moved everything to a NAS on my LAN, backed up twice (one stored at home, another stored elsewhere).
Docs, obviously just store locally in a format readable by your own PC. Anything you simply have to have in Google Docs, have a backup locally.
For IoT / Home Automation stuff, I carefully make sure that the ecosystem I buy into is self-hosted and does not require the Internet. Security cameras, thermostats, switches and lights and so on must all be usable and controllable locally. I'm not quite there yet on all of these either, but they are easily swapped out if some manufacturer's lame cloud goes down.
Not sure if I'm forgetting anything.