A while back I talked about how and why I was trying to leave many Google services behind, with my increasing clarity towards just how much it costs (in non-monetary ways) to use so many of their services. Some I already had left, some I was actively looking, and some I was undecided whether I will drop them or not.

For a refresher you can check it out where I talked about it in my love/hate relationship with Google.

But I have made further progress, and thought it would be good to update.

First, the easy one: Google Authenticator.

After a recommendation on my last post I checked out Aegis - definitely has a nice feature set, with added security over many of its competitors. I'm now using it quite happily.

I'm still in the process of changing all my 2FA accounts over, but that has more to do with sites who don't expose an easy way to change 2FA provider than it does with anything else.

I'm also within arms reach of dropping Google Calendar, dropping or minimizing my use of Google Drive, and maybe dropping Google Maps too.

I had initially checked out pCloud, and while it was more promising than Google Drive on the privacy front, there were still some issues I had with it.

Instead, after some heavy research, I now have my own self-hosted Nextcloud.

Out of the box Nextcloud is basically cloud storage, similar to Google Drive, DropBox etc. with a web-based interface, plus desktop and mobile apps for syncing your files. Plus it has a lot of multi-user/collaboration features that I won't use any time soon so I am just ignoring those (I asked friends if they wanted to join in on it, but had no takers).

It is also a CalDav/CardDav server, so I can use it as the backend for replacing Google Calendar. I already have it up and running, using Thunderbird's Lightning calendar as the front end on desktop, and I have DAVx5 running on my Android as a sync client, although I'm still using Google's Calendar app as the front end temporarily. And with CardDav support I can (for probably the first time ever) sync my contacts across devices too - it may be useful, it may not, I have never had explicit need for it before, but it just seemed like a cool thing to do easily enough while I was syncing calendars.

Nextcloud also has a huge range of extensions. I've already replaced an Android app I used for tracking hours thanks to the Time Manager extension, I have cloud-synced bookmarks thanks to the Bookmarks extension and floccus, and very soon I should be able to drop Trello thanks to the Deck extension (I wasn't happy being forced into an Atlassian account after Trello were bought by them).

I've also just started exploring the Maps extension - it uses OpenStreetMap which actually seems to be a bit more up-to-date for Kyiv than Google Maps is, however I haven't looked into setting up a routing service so I can't use it for directions yet. I also haven't accessed the web UI from my phone yet to see how well it works there.

But there are some interesting additional map features too, which I will look into in the future: tracking for your phone (considering I have only lost a phone twice in 20+ years, and each time only for a few hours, this is low on my list), contact mapping (not sure how useful it is to me since most of my contacts are just a phone number or email address), and mapping your photos (probably the most interesting to me).

On a personal note I like that OpenStreetMap shows place names in their local language instead of anglicized, which helps me practice reading Ukrainian.

Moving the majority of my files from Google Drive to Nextcloud also meant I was back under the default 4Gb limit so I've already cancelled my Google One subscription.

I've also been thinking more into replacing Google Analytics. I still won't implement analytics on my portfolio website since my host gives me some basic stats: hits per month of the last year, days of the last month, hours of the last day, and minutes of the last hour. Then I have the access logs to show me which pages were viewed and the referrer if I need to know, so that will do for now.

But I've had to use Analytics this week to get numbers on a small project after someone else linked it into public use without asking me in advance 😅. If I'd been given a little time I would have sorted out an alternative way to track the basic data I need - basically just hit count, session duration & the click of two buttons.

If that project turns into a regular income (and I'm really hoping it does), I might look at self-hosting something like Open Web Analytics or Countly Community Edition, and then I can use a single instance for analytics across all my sites.

So I've had a somewhat productive month towards privacy and setting up some good infrastructure for myself at least. Not much else has been productive - I still don't have a new apartment or job 😅

One thing to note - every replacement product I've picked is open source or open data, however I didn't choose them on that basis. If there was an equivalent closed source product I evaluated them equally, but in all cases an open source product best fit my needs, which is pretty cool in my opinion.