Hi dear reader 👋. Honestly I don’t have anything to say except I hope you have wonderful day, if not I wish you all best for you to feel better. Life sometimes may feel like it’s hard and seem like nothing goes as we planned but surely if you keep going forward, enjoy with what you have and try to take the opportunity that might come to you in order to achieve your life goals. ❤️
My journey in degoogling
Ok, here is my journey in degoogling my life. But before doing anything I’d like to say that I’m not someone who will 100% ditch google and every single of their service and app. I think Google have some of good services I still like to use, my only plan is to not be dependent on a single company like Google or some else. So let’s begin.
Search engine
Let’s start from what Google as company started. I use duckduckgo as my main search engine, I may be sometimes jump from one to other when bored but I mostly use duckduckgo. I also like duck.ai chat bot where you can chay with 4 different bots without the need for an account.
Phone
On my phone I am using lineage os with nikgapps core package. Lineage os is basically custom operating system based on android which brings your phone new life, and nikgapps core is package which contains only bare minimum google apps to run play store.
https://lineageos.org/
https://nikgapps.com/
DNS server
For my DNS server I’m using cloudflare because it’s fast and has good security for me.
For mail I’m using gmail, because I already used it and don’t really need encryption for mail. And for my mail client on android I use K-9 Mail (Thunderbird for android) on PC I use webapp.
https://k9mail.app/
Maps
Instead of google maps I decided to use OpenStreetMaps which is free and open source maps which respects privacy and everyone can contribute, I am using OrganicMaps on android which uses OpenStreetMaps
https://organicmaps.app/
https://www.openstreetmap.org/
Cloud storage
I simply do not use, I have 64GB micro SD card in my phone and use it to store pictures videos and backups of some apps. I am thinking of buying external ssd or HDD for better backup.
Podcasts
I really like podcasts and I was using google podcasts app when was still available but unfortunately they discontinued an app, as always and I tried using yt music for podcasts but I just can’t get satisfied with it, I am now using AntennaPod and I’m much more satisfied here.
https://antennapod.org/
Music
For music I either use innertune app on android or YouTube music on web browser.
https://github.com/z-huang/InnerTune
PC
Currently I am running arch with GNOME mostly because it works for me. But I also sometimes distrohop when bored. And basically the only apps I use there are Vivaldi as my browser and video and audio player, I use default GNOME apps.
Conclusion
Basically what I’m trying to say here is that I’m trying to use less Google and more from other companies and different projects. I still use gmail and YouTube because there is not much of a competition for YouTube although I do watch some PeerTube content from my Mastodon account.
Mastodon as a News Feed?
Hello everyone, if you use mastodon social network I would like to make short tutorial on how to use Mastodon as a your own news feed. Let’s get started.
In this tutorial I’m gonna use official mastodon web client. First go to your mastodon profile, click on three dots near “edit profile” and click on “lists” in drop menu.
There sould be box “New list title” click on it and name your list whatever you want, for example “News” or anything else and click add list. You should see list you created below, click on it to open. List should be empty but we will add accounts to list later. Now if you open the list you should see gear icon, click on it and if you want you can toggle “Hide these posts from home” so that posts are only visible in list.
In order to add accounts to list, go to any account (I reccomend following flipboard accounts) and follow them, click on three dots, add or remove from lists and click on list you want to add it. Now wait few minutes or hours for that account to post something, because only posts created after adding account to list will show inside list and not older posts.
