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Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org

(giuliomagnifico.blog)
351 points giuliomagnifico | 4 comments | 22 Aug 25 17:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.207s | source
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TranquilMarmot ◴[22 Aug 25 18:30 UTC] No.44988014[source]▶
I spent the past month "de-Googling" my life after I saw a notice in my Gmail inbox that it was 20 years old. I took a step back and realized just how invested into the Google ecosystem I was. Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Drive, Maps, Keep, Photos, YouTube, FitBit, Android. Basically my entire digital life. My goal was more diversifying than security/privacy, but security/privacy is a really nice bonus.

I ended up going with Proton because they had a good solution for mail, calendar, and drive which I was looking to replace. I set up my custom domain to point to it and have my Gmail forwarding to it - any time I get an email to the old Gmail address I go change it on the website or delete the account altogether.

For Google Docs / Keep, I switched over to Obsidian and pay for the sync there. It's a great replacement for my main use case of Docs / Keep which is just a dumping ground for ideas.

For Google Photos, I now self-host Immich in Hetzner on a VPS with a 1TB storage box mounted via SSHFS. I use Tailscale to connect to it. It took a few days to use Google Takeout + immich-go to upload all the photos (~300GB of data) but it's working really well now. Only costs $10/mo for the VPS and 1TB of storage.

Android I think I'll be stuck on - I have a Pixel 8 Pro that technically supports Graphene but there are too many trade-offs there. Next time I need a new phone I'll take a serious look at Fairphone but I think the Pixel 8 Pro should last a few more years.

My FitBit Versa is really old and starting to die - I ordered one of the new Pebble watches and am patiently waiting for it to ship!

YouTube I'm stuck on because that's where the content is. I have yet to find a suitable replacement for Google Maps - OpenStreetMap is still really hard to use and gives bad directions.

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1. yahoozoo ◴[22 Aug 25 22:05 UTC] No.44990425[source]▶
What’s the point though? So you don’t come across as a Google shill?
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2. palata ◴[22 Aug 25 22:13 UTC] No.44990494[source]▶
Not the author, but it's nice to support alternatives.
3. ◴[23 Aug 25 00:36 UTC] No.44991744[source]▶
4. TranquilMarmot ◴[23 Aug 25 17:55 UTC] No.44997783[source]▶
As I said, I was uncomfortable having my entire digital life "owned" by Google.

If you're unfamiliar with the concept of "monoculture" in agriculture:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoculture

> Monocultures increase ease and efficiency in planting, managing, and harvesting crops short-term, often with the help of machinery. However, monocultures are more susceptible to diseases or pest outbreaks long-term due to localized reductions in biodiversity and nutrient depletion

This was how I felt - it was easy and efficient to "just use Google" but long term it felt a bit like "nutrient depletion". A lot of the services I moved onto are better than Google in a lot of ways and have different ideas about how things should work. Sticking with Google, you will only get the Google way of doing things and services you may rely on can be killed off on a whim by some C-suite executive (https://killedbygoogle.com/)

There are also a lot of political reasons behind why I'm doing this but I don't want to get into that too much here on HN. Tech oligarchy is ruling the United States and I don't want to be complicit in that. I was also tired of being a serf of "technofeudalism" (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/751443/technofeudal...) and am seeking ways to avoid that.