I’ve been trying to disconnect my life from “cloud services” as much as possible lately. Which is to say: stop giving my personal data to corporations. The biggest and most frustrating so far has been Google. I think I’m going to have to be content there once I can fully move off of Google Photos.
Immich
Speaking of Google Photos, let’s start there. Immich is a really fantastic project by the FUTO group who’s stated goals are to develop software that you control. To that end, Immich is a self-hosted photo gallery solution much like Google Photos (to the point that it even looks like a version of Google Photos from a couple years ago). You do need to set up an instance of this software yourself, so that’s one barrier to entry if you’re not super tech inclined. That said, I am and the process was pretty easy using docker. They even have a nice little command line import tool that was able to pull in my Google Photos Takeout data(takeout being google’s term and platform for backup and export of user data). In line with FUTO’s mission statement, Immich does not phone home to any service, and if you choose to enable things like face recognition or OCR, it’s all done using a machine learning instance on your own hardware.
I started this whole process in October when I first set up the server and imported photos. The import process was pretty painless and even preserved things like albums and favorited photos from Google Photos. Then I disabled Google Photos uploading and enabled it on the Immich phone app. After confirming that was working without any issue for a few months, in early February I started removing albums, shared albums, and photos. I think I’ve deleted everything back to 2022, but it’s so tedious that I just haven’t touched it in a while. Google has no option to remove all Photos data from your account. You have to go through the web interface or the the mobile app and manually delete things en masse. I found the sweet spot to be somewhere around 3000 selected items at a time, any more than that and the web app starts acting weird. I do not want to try the mobile app for this. It sucks so bad to do. Not having an option to remove all photos data is severely anti-user.
The only downside for me personally is that now I no longer have an offsite backup of my photos like I did with Google. They’re all stored in the server in my basement.
miniflux
Ever since Google killed their RSS reader named Google Reader, I was left struggling to find a solid reader that felt good to use. I used feedly for a bit then moved to inoreader. Lately inoreader has been trying to shove AI into the app, as well as moving some features behind their paywall.. and I just said enough. Someone on Bluesky coincidentally mentioned they had just set up miniflux, so I gave it a shot. It’s simple enough. It works. And because it’s open there’s so many different client side apps that have been developed for it, but if you just want to use the built in interface, that’s perfectly serviceable too! It is, again though, another software you have to stand up on your own network. This is a road block for many people, I understand.
Home Assistant
I’ve been using Home Assistant since about 2015 and I’ve watched it mature into a very reliable platform for home automation and statistics. Home Assistant is another project dedicated to user control and privacy. They are all about empowering you to have control of your devices, your home, and your data. Yet another service you’d need to stand up an instance of if you wanted it, but they do sell hardware with it preinstalled if you wanna go that route! In fact, I run the Home Assistant Blue device, which was their first piece of hardware they ever sold. It’s no longer on the market, but support is still ongoing!
FUTO Keyboard
Hey, these guys again! I have used SwiftKey on my Android phones basically since it was released in 2010. Microsoft purchased it in 2016, and I kept using it until late last year. They kept doing little things here or there, but the biggest thing that upset me was them shoving AI into the KEYBOARD. So I discovered FUTO through a thread on Bluesky. It’s kind of a forked AOSP keyboard, but without any of the Google phone-home stuff. It also has a better feeling suggestion model than Google Keyboard. I could never move to Google Keyboard because of how horrible the suggestion model felt, but FUTO felt viable, especially after the shit Microsoft SwiftKey was pulling. Switching to Google Keyboard was also a non-starter because it too phones home and I’m trying to remove Google from my life as it is.
It honestly took me a few months to get used to the keyboard. Again, I’d been using SwiftKey for fifteen years. I had trained that keyboard, but also that keyboard had kinda trained me? I was used to it’s behavior and FUTO behaves differently. But I can safely say that yes I am able to use a non-SwiftKey keyboard, and in fact I find myself almost enjoying this keyboard? Weird!
Syncthing
An opensource app that I’m slowly setting up to replace OneDrive but have otherwise been using for specific tasks for well over a year now. This does not require a dedicated instance to run on any server or anything (though I do do that for backup to our inhouse server, but it’s not required!). You can just install it on your laptop, your phone, your other laptop, your RG353V (or other) Linux/Android handheld emulation device, etc. and configure them to synchronize files with each other! It’s very configurable and maybe a little overwhelming, but once I had it going, it’s been painless and I basically just forget that it’s running now because it Just Works.
For example, I use Syncthing to keep two of my Obsidian vaults up to date across my two laptops and my phone: One I use for personal writing and therapy notes, and the other vault which is also all the build files for my website1! It also synchronizes my projects directory and a “drop” folder that I mostly use for temporary transfers. Syncthing is also a key part of the automatic build process of my website!
These are the main ones I use on an everyday basis. I’m always on the lookout for more options to pull myself out of big corporations and their data collections.