Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org

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.

What are you doing for search?

I was a paying Kagi customer, after fleeing Google, but I can’t stomach even a trivial sum of money going to Yandex/Russia.

I miss Kagi.

> I can’t stomach even a trivial sum of money going to Yandex/Russia

This is the first I'm hearing of this, I love Kagi. Looks like Yandex represents about 2% of their costs. I assume the hangup here is that by Kagi giving money to Yandex, the Russian government gets some of that money, and that money is being used to fuel war machines?

By that logic any company that ends up giving money to a country that is participating in active wars is not okay. If you draw the line at Yandex, do you also draw it at Apple/Google/Microsoft or any other US-based company that pays taxes to the US government which has a long and *active* history of killing innocent people? Or products coming from China who is actively exterminating ethnic groups?

At some point it becomes easier to just stop using technology altogether because once you look deep enough at anything you will find ethical issues. Do you know where the precious metals in your phone, laptop, or TV came from? Where is the energy you use to power these devices coming from? What happens to those devices when they reach end of life and you don't use them anymore? By using technology in any capacity you are affecting poorer countries that bear the brunt of mining, e-waste, and climate change.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is - it's important to be cognizant of these things and reduce harm that you're doing wherever possible, but you can never be fully 100% ethical and still be a consumer of goods and services unless you do so at great inconvenience to yourself.