83 lines
3.7 KiB
Markdown
83 lines
3.7 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "I have successfully re-googled myself"
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date: 2024-10-09T20:59:43-04:00
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---
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It is quite common across tech folk (at least the ones that I speak of) to
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"de-google". I.e. get rid of Google (or, in general, big-corp) services. As you
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can imagine, after running, say, e-mail for 15+ years, the process (and the
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result) isn't fun.
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I got rid of my Gmail account in the Christmas of 2023, so about 10 months ago.
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The result was rewarding, but only because I felt "de-googled". It took just a
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few weeks to realize that it is not the end of it.
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# Reasons
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I moved from Google because:
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- Google Docs lost a couple of important documents. I did not take backups,
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because I trusted it too much. Logic: if it can lose a few documents, it can
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lose everything.
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- Privacy: I did not want to be scanned by "default" on every step of my
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e-life.
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- Possible account shutdown: an automated system may shut down my personal
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account due to a false-positive, and I will have no recourse. In that case, I
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would lose both my e-mail address (`desired.mta@gmail.com` at the time) and
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all the e-mails from the last 19 years.
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Due to all of the above, I decided to pull myself out of Google's environment.
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I have:
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- Moved all my email to [migradu](https://migadu.com). This went relatively
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well and easily: control plane is good, the open-source/free e-mail clients
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are reasonable. I settled with
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[evolution](https://help.gnome.org/users/evolution/stable/) and [k-9
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mail](https://k9mail.app/) for the phone.
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- Moved all the personal photos & videos to a directory in my file system. I
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lost all the things that I expected to lose:
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- indexing by location.
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- face recognition.
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- any preview of photos that are 3+ months old on my phone. I was not
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generally previewing old pictures on my phone, so it turned out OK.
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I installed [photoprism](https://www.photoprism.app/) to a computer in my
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closet, which allowed grouping by faces: face recognition was rather poor,
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but better than nothing, and I was able to see thumbnails.
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- Google Docs: I downloaded all the interesting files as `*.xlsx` and `*.docx`
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and put them to the file system. This was not a big change, because after
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Google lost a few of the old documents, I was already suspicious and careful.
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- Calendar. Oh, calendar. It brought warm and fuzzy memories and it was
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much, much harder to lose or replace than anything else.
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# The Calendar
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See, calendar is the problem and the thing I missed most dearly. For the last
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15 years I was used to Google auto-creating calendar events from the e-mail I
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had received. With migadu's IMAP (for email) and CalDav (for calendar), there
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was no integration between the two, and it is painful.
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Because calendar and e-mail applications are decoupled on the phone, if I add
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an event attendee, they will not receive an invitation. If you think about it,
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it is intuitive: why or how would [DAVx⁵](https://www.davx5.com/) e-mail to the
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meeting attendees? Of course it doesn't, because it's not an e-mail client,
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it's a synchronization tool.
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Calendar frustration got me back, for the better.
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# Status Quo
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I moved all my e-mail (again) from migadu.com to Google, under my personal
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domain. I use docs, e-mail and calendar now, all under `jakstys.lt`. I have
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decommissioned my e-mail address of teenage years (`desired.mta@gmail.com`) and
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haven't opened it in months.
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Pictures are self-hosted using [immich](https://immich.app/). It provides
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location indexing, facial recognition and a full-fledged mobile app. Can't ask
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for more.
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Having a calendar again is awesome.
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I did not figure out the e-mail backups yet, but I am hopeful I will get to
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them by the end of the year, when my migadu.com subscription ends.
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