It is quite common across tech folk (at least the ones that I speak of) to “de-google”. I.e. get rid of Google (or, in general, big-corp) services. As you can imagine, after running, say, e-mail for 15+ years, the process (and the result) isn’t fun.

I got rid of my Gmail account in the Christmas of 2023, so about 10 months ago. The result was rewarding, but only because I felt “de-googled”. It took just a few weeks to realize that it is not the end of it.

Reasons

I moved from Google because:

• Google Docs lost a couple of important documents. I did not take backups, because I trusted it too much. Logic: if it can lose a few documents, it can lose everything.
• Privacy: I did not want to be scanned by “default” on every step of my e-life.
• Possible account shutdown: an automated system may shut down my personal account due to a false-positive, and I will have no recourse. In that case, I would lose both my e-mail address (desired.mta@gmail.com at the time) and all the e-mails from the last 19 years.

Due to all of the above, I decided to pull myself out of Google’s environment. I have:

• Moved all my email to migradu. This went relatively well and easily: control plane is good, the open-source/free e-mail clients are reasonable. I settled with evolution and k-9 mail for the phone.
• Moved all the personal photos & videos to a directory in my file system. I lost all the things that I expected to lose:

  • indexing by location.

  • face recognition.

  • any preview of photos that are 3+ months old on my phone. I was not generally previewing old pictures on my phone, so it turned out OK.

    I installed photoprism to a computer in my closet, which allowed grouping by faces: face recognition was rather poor, but better than nothing, and I was able to see thumbnails.

• Google Docs: I downloaded all the interesting files as *.xlsx and *.docx and put them to the file system. This was not a big change, because after Google lost a few of the old documents, I was already suspicious and careful.
• Calendar. Oh, calendar. It brought warm and fuzzy memories and it was much, much harder to lose or replace than anything else.

The Calendar

See, calendar is the problem and the thing I missed most dearly. For the last 15 years I was used to Google auto-creating calendar events from the e-mail I had received. With migadu’s IMAP (for email) and CalDav (for calendar), there was no integration between the two, and it is painful.

Because calendar and e-mail applications are decoupled on the phone, if I add an event attendee, they will not receive an invitation. If you think about it, it is intuitive: why or how would DAVx⁵ e-mail to the meeting attendees? Of course it doesn’t, because it’s not an e-mail client, it’s a synchronization tool.

Calendar frustration got me back, for the better.

Status Quo

I moved all my e-mail (again) from migadu.com to Google, under my personal domain. I use docs, e-mail and calendar now, all under jakstys.lt. I have decommissioned my e-mail address of teenage years (desired.mta@gmail.com) and haven’t opened it in months.

Pictures are self-hosted using immich. It provides location indexing, facial recognition and a full-fledged mobile app. Can’t ask for more.

Having a calendar again is awesome.

I did not figure out the e-mail backups yet, but I am hopeful I will get to them by the end of the year, when my migadu.com subscription ends.