Well, to today to an extent. Eventually I get to eat them all.
Last week I was smirking about how I like making Google foot the bill for me saying things that they wouldn’t approve of. This week, they have to go do something stupid enough that I finally feel it’s time to do a little something to begin de-Googling my life.
God certainly hates a smartass, doesn’t he?
It isn’t like I haven’t considered it before. Google used to be the “Do no evil” folks. Well, they’ve blown that off for years. Cooperating with China to block their population from freely accessing information, slowly but surely impinging more and more on their users’ privacy, their increasing internal ideological purity requirements–all of it has sit increasing less and less well with me. But the difficulty and amount of work, plus the issue of most of the options being less useful and less usable, has kept me in the Google fold.
Well, that’s stopping now. It’s going to take a while, and it’s going to cost me some money, up front and probably in on-going costs, but Google and I are getting a divorce. And I’m going to take all their shit out, pile it up in the yard and set it on fire.
The first thing is search. Right now I’ve swapped over to Bing, but I might go on over to DuckDuckGo. It will depend on the browser I decide to move to, because Chrome is on it’s way out. I really want to go to the Brave browser, not only because it works, but because it was started by the guy Firefox ran out in a bout of political correctness.
Email will be a lot more work. I already have a Yahoo email, but I really like the look of Proton Mail. There are also some other alternatives out there, including getting my own domain or three and hosting my own. No matter what, it’ll be a lot of work–all those email lists and such that I’ll have to change.
This blog will be the biggest PITA. I can do a Squarespace site easy enough and they aren’t horribly expensive. They also come with a handy website and some ecommerce abilities, which opens up the possibility of making this pay for itself. I know that I’ll have a bunch of folks saying “WordPress!” WordPress is a big dog on the Internet, and there is a lot of ready-made stuff for it. But for the blog, I’m not going to be in a hurry.
Remember when you used to see these all over the Intertubz? Well get ready.
8/19/2017, 11:00 PM: I have just finished converting nearly all the web and forum logins I have to the new email address. I decided to go with Outlook.com for the email. Yes, I’m trading evil Google for evil Microsoft, but I find their corporate evil to be of a more palatable version. Plus it’s free, no ads, and it allows me to consolidate my calendars, which simplifies my life and allows me to loose a kludgy piece of sync software. I didn’t know how many logins I had and how many needed to be purged. I guess you need to do that bit of housekeeping every 15 years or so. I found a few websites that are throw-backs to the late 90s/early 2000s where I can’t change my email address, and one browser add-in that won’t work in the new browser of choice for now, MS Edge. Wheelgun has made an intriguing suggestion that I’m going to explore, along with some others. Brave unfortunately sin’t working well for me, loading slowly, loading sites slowly and slowing down as more tabs are opened. I’m pretty disappointed at that.
This is being even more work than I expected, and I expected it to be a lot. I hope a freaking asteroid drops on the Googleplex.
DuckDuckGo is good for general searching. Though I usually switch to Bing for news.
As for browsers, I seem to use them all at one point or another. I really like Vivaldi – which is an offshoot of Opera. It is a chromium-based browser so most of the stuff you like about Chrome will probably be there. I was having some trouble with an old version of Opera, but that may have been fixed.
And of course I switched to WordPress when Google fist turned against the 2nd Amendment – or at least in a way that I noticed. Which was sometime in 2012.
If you run your own domain, you have more options with WP than if you use one of their hosted blogs, but my goal has always been to spend zero money. I spend enough time. And I will never have 1000s of followers required to make money. (I had some Amazon ads way back in the day, in 10 years I think I made about 15 bucks.)
Anyway. Good luck with all of the choices. Oh, and I left my original blog in place and renamed it "The Archives" even though there was a liberator for converting everything. Easier that way on anyone who had links. Not that there that many left.