r/degoogle

Hey everyone,

As part of my degoogling journey, I built a home server using my old 2011 PC. So far I’ve set it up with Arch Linux, Podman for containers, Quadlet for setting up NetBird, Nginx Proxy Manager for TLS certificates, Node-RED and systemd services for automation.

To make things reasonably secure, I used Podman for my services and Quadlet to run NetBird as a systemd service.

With this setup, I’ve been able to move away from Google Photos, Google Drive, and I’m slowly moving away from Gmail too.

I’ve been keeping a small internal doc of what I did so I can remember it later. I was thinking of turning it into a proper guide if enough people are interested.

The guide could cover things like Arch setup, Cockpit setup, Podman setup, Nginx Proxy Manager setup, Node-RED automation setup, and the other steps I used to build the server.

Would anyone here be interested in something like that?

I love internet surfing and always have. You can find so many cool things online when you just let ADD take the wheel (mouse). It's how I managed to even find anime as a teen. I usually get hella extensions for protection on my phone and pc, but search engines on firefox and google are turning into a empty potato. I try web surfing and keep hitting dead ends that make no sense to be dead ends. It's like you need to have specific sites in mind, tons of images are hidden now and I was just wondering what website and/or browser you guys woukd recommen instead.

I don't want to accidentally click on a site that gets me hacked or makes me feel like an accomplice for whatever I see, just the freedom internet had before whatever is going on and the link rot eating away at stuff.

Has anyone tried mailfence? Did you like it?

While I care about privacy and all that, my main priority is to have a search engine with high quality search results, and is preferably free, but I am willing to consider search engines that cost up to $5/month with unlimited searches. I am also uninterested in GPTs, I want a traditional search engine. Which search engine that fits this description has the best results?

I finally made the move to delete everything on my Google drive and start eliminating everything I have stored on there, for now I'm using an external SSD to store my files locally. I won't create or use anything in Google anymore. Unfortunately, I have an old Samsung phone, because it's all that I can afford. They recently moved over to Google messages for who knows what reason other than pure laziness and greed. So there's no Samsung native messages anymore. You have to use Google messages now which is absurdly annoying and it natively connects to Google Gemini even if you don't want it to. Goes through their servers of course.

So what's the alternative? Facebook messages owned by meta, and scraped for their own AI. Get an iPhone but then I have to use an Apple product. If you use WhatsApp that's owned by Facebook. It's unbelievable. I did switch my browser to Firefox maxed out on the privacy no telemetry always use incognito and now I'm using ecosia search engine. Feels a little nicer.

But there's always Google somewhere, somehow. I don't know how but I keep getting ads on Instagram and other places like Reddit, targeted ads, about things that I've spoken about in real life or looked at even on Firefox incognito tabs. Doesn't really make sense

Amazing for motivation:
“Everyone is unhappy; the only people who are not unhappy are, literally, executives,” an Instagram employee told WIRED”

That is just where we want Meta ;)

I just started using proton calendar. In general the app seems to be fine, although I haven't used it enough to make a good judgment yet. Something I missed immediately is it not having a tasks function. I would like to have an open source tasks managing solution that works within the same app as my agenda. Any recommendations or solutions?

We already know which phone features to replace, but what solutions are currently available for external devices such as TV dongles, fitness trackers/smartwatches, routers, wireless audio systems like Chromecast with Nest, IoT management, etc.?

I’m talking about things that complement the ecosystem and work without relying on Google or those malicious third parties—and that, clearly, don’t sell your data.

Any tools, products, etc., that you know of?