I am a phone scroller and social media reader and a YouTube watcher. My phone and by extension my Google account are my mobile office. I regret having to buy an Apple Mac Mini but I am not giving up Logic as my DAW. I got away from overpriced Samsung devices a few years ago and have a fairly bloat-free Motorola. Now I want to dump the Google ecosystem. I intend to download all of my pics and files from Drive and the Google cloud. I am not so tech savvy that I can install APKs or switch to Linux, and I’d like to watch video streamers that aren’t saturated in developer links (seriously, why do y’all do this?..just put one simple link to “Developer Info” or something and put all the other links there). I want to use and enjoy the net like any idiot would but without being The Product. I am Lemmy over Reddit (though you both ban me from subs with equal ferver); MeWe over Facebook (though MeWe is moving towards an unprivate model now); Mastodon over Xittstain. I have a ProtonMail account, but mainly for registrations…I have had a Gmail account since Earthlink took a nosedive.
What/who else is out there for me to frequent and replace all the corporatist models?in the past I tried Minds (all Nazis all the time!) and Ello (socmed for creative types, yet still looks like a shitty 1970’s mimeographed zine). I also spent a couple of years at one called MyBetzCo that started out okay but died because none of the members would make public posts for interacting with others.
What do you recommend for private/decentralizwd clouds, socmeds or media sites?
Lots of good advice in here; thanks!
I’m not going sledgehammer; I’ve been gradually stepping away for a long time. There’s a few things I can’t give up yet but I keep them to a minimum while trying to persuade others in the social mediasphere to join me in circumventing the Big Tech DataWhores. I’m still paying for YT premium (sad); I have FB only to use Messenger with a couple of people. I already use DDG, Mastodon, Lemmy, MeWe, DropBox, Protonmail. I am not going so far as to self-host…I dont have the time or money for that.
Hopefully some more ideas show up here and are helpful to others who feel the same as I do. Thanks!