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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • I have started to degoogle bits and pieces. I self-host the majority of the services I need and really enjoyed the journey so far since I learned so much. I am approaching the stage in my life where I have less time to spend on personal hobbies so I fear this path may not be sustainable. In my opinions here are the pros and cons.

    Pros:

    • Full control of my data
    • Pick the ideal tool from the open source community
    • Learning experience
    • Engagement with community

    Cons:

    • Technical knowledge needed to setup and maintain self-hosted tools
    • Self-hosted environments have security risks (best to put everything behind VPN)
    • Disparate tools don’t connect together (requires additional automation configuration)
    • Additional costs for services including and not limited to: domain name, email, backup storage, self-host server hardware, VPN, and donations to devs
    • Higher personal downtime due to lacking features, server and service maintenance
    • Time sink to learn, research, general devops of tools, maintenance of server

    Key services to name a few:

    • File storage - Nextcloud
    • File sync - Syncthing
    • Office - Nextcloud + Collabora
    • Email - Mailfence
    • Photos - Photoprism

    So far there are more negatives than positives, but the positives still outweigh negatives. I do have to say degoogling is getting easier than before.