thaedrus

joined 1 year ago
[–] thaedrus@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

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 tools 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.