State of De-Googling

It’s march 2025 and I thought it was time to do a quick check in on my progress in “de-googling”. It’s funny how a company and service that became so ubiquitous its name replaced “searching” in everyday speach, now is far enough on the path to enshitification that degoogling has become its own verb.

Like it or not, Google has created some fantastic products for more than two decades. It has also filled the graveyard of time with dozens of more or less memorable products. While always being an advertising-giant first and foremost it has become more and more obvious how “paying with your data” has fueled this ad-empire. And, in my opinion, over the last few years Google has gradually shifted away from making excellent products towards maximizing profits.

So, like many others, I started the process of gradually fading out reliance on their product for my everyday life. I decided to be pragmatic about it. Cutting out everything over night would have been too painful of an option. There was also considerations like costs, privacy, quality of the alternatives, WAF (Wife Aproval Factor) and more to account for. While I’ve come a long way there are a few stubborn products that will be almost impossible to quit outright.

I’ll preface this by saying that some of these shifts have required, or rather have been additionally motivated by, the wish for retaking controll over my data. And therefore a lot of the solutions for me have been to self host services on my own server that fill the gaps left by leaving Google services. While this aproach is probably easier than ever due to great communities and wonderful, powerful open source software out there I will say that it does come at some risk if you are not confident in managing data and servers. However, if you are the least bit curious I would highly encourage trying it out. Here are my quick list of tips to reduce risk and fascilitate starting out:

• Buy a custom domain and tie your new services to that in parallell to your existing accounts. Keep what works as a primary or backup until you are confident you can make the jump.
• Use an old desktop, laptop or whatever to get started. No need to pour money into things before you have some experience and an idea of what you need.
• Make it your first order of business to set up two separate backup mechanisms (yes, two - you’ll thank me later)¹. As soon as you have “production” data - meaning any data you would be sad to loose - make sure to follow the 3-2-1 backup rule and to test your backups. Remember that some data can be reaquired while some data is lost forever. Usually the irreplacable data is rather small in terms of storage and will not be expensive to backup properly.
• KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid. Center your system around files that can be backed up, modified and recovered. Unless it’s your day job or for fun there is probably no justifications introducing complexities like Kubernetes.
• Spend a little time understanding Docker, and especially docker compose files. It will probably be the basis of a lot of the services you are drawn to and the basics are not too bad. Understanding how volumes work for example will greatly help you back them up.
• Perfect is the enemy of good enough.

Actual de-Googling

Calendar, Tasks/Keep and Contacts to Baïkal

I wrote about setting up Baïkal in my last post. That now takes care of my Calendar, Todos and Contacts. Baïkal is the server side and as for clients anything that supports Caldav is up for grabs. Personally I’ve gone Thunderbird, Gnome integration and Mac Calendar/Reminders on desktop, and for Android DAVx⁵ is syncing the data to the Samsung calendar and contacts app as well as Tasks.org that I use for reminders and todos.

I am super happy with this move. I’ve actually taking up using my and the family calendar much more in addition to tasks and task management!

Chrome(ium) to Firefox

Honestly I don’t think I ever really daily drove Chrome more than a few months when it came out. Since realising there were alternatives to Internet Explorer I jumped between Firefox and Opera (until they killed off Presto). I probably used Chrome for a time when Firefox was at it’s most bloated, but that has not been a problem in daily browsing for many years.

Mozilla and Firefox has been in some hot weather the last few weeks due to some wording in their privacy policy. My thoughts about the matter can be summed up thusly for now:

• Mozilla needs to be kept honest so reactions are warranted
• Mozilla is looking at loosing 80% of their revenue if their Google-money go away due to anti-trust rulings. They will need to handle that change somehow.
• Firefox is orders of magnitude better for privacy and user choice than anything Google has had their hand in
• Mozilla’s users hold them to a much higher standard. Sometimes even too high, and their outbursts online scare people to objectively much worse options
• Keeping an open alternative to Chromium viable for everyday web-browsing is probably the only thing saving Chromium-derived browsers from slowly turning from tools serving the user to ones serving the service providers and bich tech. I cannot overstate how important this is. We already see the beginnings with Extension Manifest v3.

On the last point. Read Cory Doctorow great piece on loyal user agents.

Google Search to Kagi

I’ve used Kagi for well over a year at this point. It started with Google results actually feeling worse. Always piping me into some scraped, AI-summarized top-ten site that beraly scratched the surface of being useful. I spent a few months on Qwant which I like the idea of. They seem to be one of the only players building their own index to compete with Bing and Google - and they’re french!

However I am currently using Kagi due to

• Anecdotaly better results
• I want to encourage alternatives to ad-driven services

I’ll make sure to re-evaluate Qwant from time to time.

Next steps

I have a tendency to get carried away. Like the section about de-googling Chrome almost turned into a long rant about Mozilla’s user base, loyal user agents and the future of the web. So for now we wrap up what is part 1 of this series.

Part 2 is up!