I’m curious because I see a ton of Google hate on here daily. It’s certainly not all unwarranted, and I do agree with some of the privacy concerns.
That being said I do very much enjoy their products. Gmail, Photos, Chrome, Gemini, Home, Assistant, YouTube, Pixel phones, etc… I’ve tried out many of the alternatives but always come back to their ecosystem.
Curious as to how many of you here on the fedi use Google products without the common associated angst from the FOSS community.
Google is unavoidable but I do my best to mitigate the worst parts of their privacy intrusions.
I have a pixel phone running grapheneOS with Google Services Framework installed but without Google Play or Gboard or any of that stuff. For me that’s a balance that works.
I host my own email server so no Gmail.
I also host my own Matrix server and avoid WhatsApp where possible (not Google but just as bad if not worse).
I use YouTube but via Newpipe or using Ublock origin on Firefox (not logged in obviously).
Chrome is genuinely worse than Firefox now that Google have made adblocking more difficult with manifest v3.
You just have to decide what the best tradeoff is between privacy and convenience.
How are you finding this? How much is it costing you, and how much time/effort does it take for maintenance and also how was it setting up? I’ve also heard that self-hosting a mail server means your emails usually get marked as spam, have you had this problem? Interested in self-hosting email but I’m not sure it’s worth the effort for me and my threat model.
I started in 2012, and it wasn’t that difficult. I’d say I do about 30mins of maintenance every other month. It took me a while to work out the config originally, but I wrote a guide afterwards which was really popular for other people doing the same thing (it’s quite out of date now but the principles are the same).
Started out using a raspberry pi (which was also hosting a website at the time) but when I moved house to somewhere with a worse internet connection I migrated to a VPS, so there is a cost but it’s not enormous, maybe £20/month.
Don’t even bother if you can’t use a static IP, because all your email will be bounced if your PTR record for the IP (reverse DNS record) doesn’t match your domain name.
It got a bit more complicated when people started adding extra layers of spam protection like SPF, DKIM and DMARC, but those are mostly set and forget.
Overall, I’d say it’s worth it but only because I find it quite interesting/fun.