Episode: 3832
Title: HPR3832: How I left Google behind
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3832/hpr3832.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 06:16:34

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3832.
For Tuesday 11 April 2023, today's show is entitled, How I Left Google Behind.
It is hosted by Minix, and is about 30 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
This summary is, just an overview of what services I now use to replace previously used
Google services.
Hello, this is Minix.
I thought I'd do a little overview of what I did to get rid of Google, how I replaced
all the different Google services I used in the past, and not really so much why everybody
has their own reasons.
I guess the main reason is that I just wanted to have control over my data and services
I used and didn't really want to depend on another company to do that for me.
Mainly because if they ever go under, which Google is a pretty big company but still,
if they ever go under, then I just lose all my stuff, and if I was going to lose everything,
I wanted it to be me that screwed up and not depending on another company.
This is just kind of off the top of my head, so I may miss a few things, but I wanted
to go ahead and get a show out for the queue.
I've been through lots of iterations of different hardware to host these services, and it would
deserve its own show, everything I've tried, from many PCs, the Raspberry Pi's, all that
stuff.
Currently, I've settled on it just a decent desktop computer, which I use as a server.
It's got a 11 chin i5 in it, 64 gigabytes of RAM, and then 12 terabytes of SSDs, and on
top of that, I run Proxmox, which is a Debian-based hypervisor, and within that, I run my
services as either Linux containers or virtual machines, depending on what the actual application
is.
So I'll just kind of go down the line of what I host, and what it replaces for me as
far as Google goes.
One of the first things I was interested in was next cloud, before was next cloud, it
was own cloud, and I had hosted that, not really successfully on the original Raspberry
Pi, and that was so underpowered that just waiting for the web interface to load, took
forever, but that was my first kind of self-hosting experience.
Since then, I've gone through, like I've said, lots of different machines, but currently
I run next cloud on the Proxmox server, and that helps me replace things like Google
Drive, Google Photos, I was using Google Photos quite a bit, to the point that I got a message
from Google, eventually that said, if you want to use this much data, you're going to
have to start paying for it, which was another reason that I kind of wanted to get off
Google services, like I said, if I'm going to pay for something, I'd rather be something
that I physically own here, rather than cloud storage on somebody else's computer.
So next cloud handles my photo library now, it handles my notes, so I was using Google
Keep, I believe it's called, you know, for a long time, which was nice because I could
access it across different browsers and machines as long as I had a Gmail account.
And now I use next cloud notes instead, there's a few features it doesn't have that Google
Keep does, but it's nothing that prevents me from using it as I like to use it, which
is just a simple note-taking app, I don't really use it to compose letters or anything
like that.
That's more kind of the open office territory, which is another thing that I use next cloud
for, is for office applications like Google Sheets and stuff like that, I use the next cloud
office for that.
So photos, notes, just general data that would go to Google Drive, and I'll keep on my
next cloud.
The next thing was getting my email up and running, and that's the very first Google
service I started with was email.
When everything I researched online, I made it seem like you had to be like a hardcore
admin, you know, great beard to ever run an email server, but honestly, if you have
the right ISP that will allow certain ports to be open with 25 so that you can send and
receive email, it's not that difficult.
At least the way I run it is not, I use an application called iRedMail, I use the community
additions so you have to maintain it yourself, but it's free and open source, and that's
installed within a VM on Proxmox on Debian, and it's not really, I mean, it's a little
daunting at first getting it set up.
I want to set up and you have your spam filters working, and you have, you know, your
demark records, everything within your DNS set up correctly, as long as your ISP allows
you, like I said, to have like, you know, port 25 open, which mail servers need, what's
a lot of ISPs don't.
So if you're going to host an email server, check first with your ISP that you can actually
do so, host an email server, with my ISP it's not really a problem, I actually just called
them and told them what I was going to do, and they opened the port right up for me so,
but you might want to check beforehand just to make sure you can before you actually
get into installing it.
So I use iRedMail, there's like a million different options out there, and it comes with
a nice little administrative interface, web-based interface, and I have that on, I believe
256 gigabytes of space, and I have my personal email and my kind of contracting email that
I do different work on with customers as well, and then I have an email address on there
that I use just for like promotional stuff, you know, enter contester to sign up for
different things.
So, and that works pretty well, and I don't really have an issue with spam either with
iRedMail, and I think I use about four gigs of RAM with that virtual machine from my email,
but like I said, email, if you take the time to read the docs and take your time with
setup, and go through all the instructions carefully, and have just at least the basic
knowledge of the way computers and networking works, and Linux in my case, I think you
will find it's not nearly as daunting as they say it is.
I use my mail server for everything, mail-related now, I don't, and I'm using Gmail or any other
email servers, so that replace Gmail for me.
As far as a music app, I was big into Google Play music, and it was cool at the time because
you could upload all of your music to Google Play music, and then you can access it for
free with the app, and if you wanted to use their music library like for things you didn't
know, you could pay a fee, just like any other music streaming service, and I did that
for a while.
I had Google Play music, and I had a big library on there, and it worked okay until they
switched to YouTube music, and then I hated it.
I hated the interface, I hated a lot of my music that I had uploaded was no longer on there,
I guess because of licensing rights, and the quality of the audio was bad, it was like
they were using YouTube video, YouTube videos of the songs that I had uploaded in high quality
and playing them back, and like a low quality YouTube video quality, and even if I had changed
the settings, the high quality, it's still a side bad, and a friend of mine had a Spotify
account, family account, so he put me on there, and that was better than YouTube music, actually
I still have that account, I don't use it for much, but the quality at least was better,
and the number of artists was more varied, and but still there was things that I would
look for on there that I knew existed, because I listened to them, but they just weren't
on Spotify, and so I said, well I got this giant music library, well I just hosted myself
as well, so what I came into was a funk well, which if you remember there was a service
called Groove Shark a long time ago that you could upload your own music library to,
and then you could play other songs from other people's libraries, and it was all free,
it was ad-supported, but basically you can pay anything, and that eventually got killed
by I think copyright holders and things like that, so funk well you could say is kind of
like the Groove Shark spiritual successor, that's kind of where they get the name, and
you self-host data, or they have recommended posters too, but it not only does it host
your music library, but the web interface is really nice, and the mobile app is real nice,
I use it for Android, and also it's federated too, it's part of the fedaverse, so if anybody
else you can follow somebody's music library from any federated app, or you can federate
your funk well library with theirs, which I do with one more co-host on Linux Logcast,
we have federated our servers together, so we can share music, and it's a really good,
not just music listening, but music sharing, application, and it's good at tagging your music,
and all that stuff, it's what I use in place of playing music slash YouTube music Spotify now,
and I've been able to browse other people's libraries and find a lot of cool stuff too,
that kind of how Spotify recommends you music, I can browse other people's federated libraries,
and do the same thing with funk well, and plus it's my music, you know, it's not going to go away,
anytime soon, unless I just screw up my server or something, but speaking of YouTube music,
there's also YouTube as in the original video service, which I still use, but I use it in a way
that I'm not logging into Google, and so I guess it's not completely leaving Google behind,
but for me it's a lot better experience, which I use a service called Inviteus,
which I host myself, and it's just an alternate user interface for YouTube,
and it's very low in resources, I think I only give it like a gig or ram or something, but
you can create a account on your Nvidia server, you can give the address to other people,
so they can use your Nvidia server, but what it does is it gives you a way to browse YouTube
without logging in to a Gmail account, and also it blocks ads, and it gives you other options,
like you can download videos straight from the Inviteus Web Interface and things like that.
Now it doesn't have like its own mobile app, which is okay, I mean I use it in the browser,
it's fine, but what I do like about it is that it doesn't include all the crowd that I hate
about YouTube, as far as I recommend to me things that I have zero interest in, and that have
nothing to do with the kind of videos I actually watch, you can import your YouTube subscriptions
into Inviteus as well, so you'll have all your subs there, and YouTube has really gotten bad,
as in I just cramied lately, I used it the other day, just to kind of look through around,
and I was like, man, I'm really glad that I don't, this isn't the main interface I used to access
YouTube now, I use Inviteus, and that it just, I mean the amount of things that they try to push on
you, it's just terrible, I mean it's like terrible videos, all this clickbait stuff, and you know,
anyway, that's a whole nother story, but Inviteus is what I used to view YouTube, not a host
my own videos, instead of using YouTube like I did in the past, I used PeerTube, and PeerTube
is another self-hostable web application that you can upload your videos to, it's federated as well,
so you can browse other federated PeerTube instances, and the name kind of gives you a clue as
into how it works, where it doesn't just stream from your server, it also uses other peers that
are part of the network to help you stream the data, so it doesn't bog down your server if you
have a lot of people watching your videos, and you can comment on videos, you can add hashtags,
you can do whatever you want to, just like you can on YouTube, now of course the audience is
way, way smaller, and if you really want to engage with people, you're going to have a lot of
harder time than you would with YouTube, which already has a huge built-in audience, but PeerTube
is getting bigger and better every day, but it's self-hosted and it's federated, so
you're going to have to understand that as you're searching for things, you may come across
videos or opinions, things like that that you don't agree with, and then it would never be allowed
on YouTube or any other centralized service, but that's kind of the trade-off of a self-hosted
federated option like that, is anybody can pretty much post whatever they want, and there's ways to
block those things and block other users that you find like trolls and stuff like that, and
it's ways to do that, but for me anyway, it is satisfying to see people engage with my videos on
PeerTube, but I don't know, it's not monetized or anything like that, but also I don't have ads,
or anything that centralized service would try to push into your videos and make you watch
if you're watching other videos, so as far as YouTube goes, I use it in videos to watch YouTube
videos, and I use PeerTube to post my own videos, so let's see what else. Hangouts, Google Hangouts,
I was a big user of that, and of course we all know what happened to Google Hangouts,
and now I have no idea what it is, Google Chat, I think they had several other services,
it's in the graveyard pretty much though, so Hangouts was pretty big with me and my friends
because even if you had an Android phone and somebody else had an Apple phone, it was cross-platform,
and we could all chat with each other in different Hangout rooms and stuff like that, and from there,
I went to Signal or Telegram, I'm not sure which one I went to first,
but it may have been Telegram, and that was okay, people weren't as familiar with Telegram,
once again, even though it's a more privacy oriented, you don't own the main server,
and you don't really have access to it, and so it's always bug me in the back of my mind,
and Signal is the same way, I mean it's open signals open source of course, but
unless everybody subscribes to your signal server, you're not going to be able to communicate
with other signal users, so it's open source, but it's still centralized,
then there's text messages to things like that, but ultimately I kind of settled on the matrix
protocol using the Synapse Server and then Element as a client, so Matrix has been a big kind of
boon for me as far as finding other like-minded people through different matrix rooms, and then
chatting with my friends, and we have a matrix room for the logcast, and you know,
where people can gather, and so it's replaced, you know, things like Google Hangouts and Telegram,
and stuff like that, and I host my own matrix server, so I have control over it, you know, I don't
have to worry about it, that somebody pulling the service someday, and I've used Discord in the
past as well, which is pretty cool, but from what I would like to be up front in this episode,
I got banned from Discord, and it wasn't anything I did, it was, I think I was using the YAHU email
account, and it had gotten hacked or something, so apparently it's whoever hacked my YAHU account
disseminated all this spam and stuff, and so of course they didn't listen to anything I had to say,
which I didn't really care, I wasn't that invested in Discord, but so that got me out of Discord,
which is kind of what turned me on to Matrix in the first place, is because who's going to ban
me from owning server and nobody, you know, and also what I hear from other people and from friends
as Discord is kind of, they're really pushing their paid service, maybe Nitro or something like that,
and there was some kind of uproar about terms and conditions that, anyway, I don't really keep
up with that stuff, but to me it seems like, as far as the chatting service goes,
you want to keep those chats that you have with friends, and maybe you want to go back and look at
things that you said in the past, and look at web links and stuff like that, and if that all
depends on Discord, always being there, always providing you access, and not paywalling you
at some point in time, and I think you may be heading for a bad time in the future, or something
ever happens to audio messages and stuff like that, so that kind of starred me on the whole Discord
thing, and I moved permanently to Matrix, and I've enjoyed Matrix, and I recommend everybody,
at least give it a try, you can sign up a free account on matrix.org, and just see if you like
it, and see if you can talk to friends in a joining as well, so, as far as chatting programs,
chatting applications, Matrix in a roundabout way has replaced Google Hangouts for me,
I see what else I'm trying to think, okay, I know one thing that I still rely on Google for,
it's just in full disclosure, is I use Google Domains for all my domain, my web domains, but
I don't have to, you know, that's one thing that's, that there's so many domain providers out there
that I could sign up with anybody, it's just me being lazy, and honestly, they don't collect a lot
of information for me when it comes to, you know, just having a domain service with them, so it's
not like a Gmail account where everything is recorded and stuff like that, so I may, you know, switch
just to fully get off Google in the future, but I'm really not in a big hurry, so it's not a big
deal, it's cheap 12 bucks a year or so, and they're reliable, so I'm trying to think where,
I know there's something, I'm okay, social, kind of like social media, I don't know if anybody
that's listening, you ever used it in the past, but Google Plus, I thought was great,
there was one of the things that Google did that I was really disappointed that they got rid of,
because to me, it did social media right, or as far as, you know, the people that you interact with,
you could have these circles, and it was very tech oriented as far as the audience that I was
drawn to on Google Plus, and it wasn't just full of ads, you know, of course, they were harvesting
a data, which is how they were giving them a flow, and I don't think it really took off like in
the mainstream, so, you know, just like a lot of Google products kind of went away, but at that,
at the time, I thought they did a good job with Google Plus, and that was my main, kind of social media
outlet with Google Plus, and after that went away, I went to
Miwi, which I still haven't encountered, I just don't visit it anymore, and Miwi was actually,
or is actually, I think it's still around, it's still pretty good, as far as I know,
you know, a lot of people don't use it, like they used to, and, but, you know, they tell you
it's privacy-oriented, and it's very minimal as far as ads go, and things like that, and they had
lots of groups and stuff, cool groups, which is what I liked about Google Plus too. Facebook has
always been like a non-starter with me, there's just way too many things wrong with Facebook,
I could do a whole show on that, all the things that are on the Facebook. Twitter, I just don't
really care about, so Google Plus, and then Miwi was cool, and now that I've gone kind of the
self-hosted route, I just took to Mastodon, a host mode of Mastodon, which is also really
easy to do. You can host it natively in a virtual machine, I think, I have about 128 gigabytes
of a hard drive space on there, and then maybe only like two gigabytes of RAM, I can't remember.
I have to go back and look, but anyway, it doesn't take, it's not very resource-intensive either,
and depending on what you post, you really don't need a lot of space, but as far as just like
following people that I'm interested in, and putting my own projects out there, and just quick
little notes and photos and stuff like that, I'm actually just stick to Mastodon, my own Mastodon
instance, and it's federated as well, so that as far as tech-oriented things that I'm really
interested in, Mastodon does a good job of replacing Google Plus for me for what I need it for,
or what I want it for, I don't need it for what I want it for. If I want to write longer
form things, I have a blog that I can do that with, and I use Write Freely, which is a,
I like a blogging service that you can host yourself, or you can sign up for a Write Freely
account on the own, but it's federated as well, so I mean, I can follow anybody's Write Freely
blog from any other federated service like Mastodon, you know, people follow my Write Freely blog
from their own Mastodon accounts and stuff, and so for like longer form articles that aren't just
quick messages on Mastodon, I'll post them a blog that's Write Freely, and I recommend Write
Freely, it's really easy, it's just a real simple web service, and I have that, and I know
Nix container, I think I have like one Google RAM for that, and maybe 64 gigabytes of hard drives,
space I believe, storage on that container, which is more than enough for what I use it for,
mainly just writing, and sometimes small videos, if I post a video on there, it would be linked
back to my peer tube, which I have plenty of storage on, so, so I'm trying, I'm trying to think
of what else I might use the Google services, I use Android, which, you know, is a Google company,
but I would really like to go to a Linux phone one day, right now the whole Linux mobile
handscape is a little rough, but I still have hope, you know, as because the pine phone and what
Lieberman's done, and other companies that, that they will keep advancing in a way that I can actually
use it as a daily driver without, without sacrificing too much, as long as I have
certain applications, you know, GPS is one I use a lot of my phone, things like that, so I'm hoping
in the future I can, I can get rid of Android too, which would, I guess, would kind of be the
final nail in the coffin for Google, for me, I still use Google search, but other search engines
are catching up, especially with ChagyPT integration and things like that, so, sometimes you use
being, there's several self-hosted search engines that you can use as well, I can't remember the names
of them all, but I've tried them in the past and I had a hard time like searching for things,
finding what I wanted, Tattaco is decent, I used Tattaco quite a bit, along with Google
search and being and things like that, but I wouldn't really call that, you know,
because I don't log into that, I mean, I'm sure they keep a history of what I search for, but
I'm not logged in when I'm doing searching on Google searches, and so I don't really
wouldn't say that that's anything, you know, that I would miss if Google search went away,
and there's plenty of other search engines, so I can't really think of any other Google services
I use, I guess Android is a big one as long as, and I use Google Maps on my phone too, which
open street maps I've been looking at a lot, and I wanted to contribute to that as well, so,
all in all, I don't think my Tattaco might be a little misleading how I left Google behind,
because I didn't completely leave it, but I was able to replace a lot of the services that I
had used Google for in the past, and maybe this will give you kind of an overview of some things
that you can do if you want to, if you want to decentralize your digital life and get off of Google
Microsoft and some of the big players out there, so if you get any questions,
feel free to leave any comments on the HPR or episode page, and I'll be happy to answer them.
For now, have a good night, and I will talk to you later.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio, does work.
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