I’ve gotten more aggressive with blocks lately. Feels like there’s been a lot more arguing and drama on here lately than usual, and I haven’t been on as much because of it. Blocking at least drowns a lot of that out.

For photos, immich is great if you’re willing to self-host. It’s pretty much a drop-in replacement for Google photos, and lets you tweak the machine learning and stuff like that if you want automated identification of your photos. A raspberry pi is enough to get going, maybe something fancier if you want the machine learning. Google Drive can be replaced with Nextcloud as well if you go down the self-hosting rabbit hole.

Ente is probably your best bet if you don’t want to host anything yourself. I used proton drive for photos before but thought it wasn’t particularly suitable as if you’re looking for a particular photo it takes ages for it to load from their servers.

I saw it mentioned in this Cory Doctorow article a week or two back about some of his issues with bluesky, but he mentions here that the cost has came down from tens of millions a year down to tens of dollars a month

Hadn’t heard of wafrn until seeing it on f-droid this morning but I might give it a try, a tumblr-like platform would be nice since tumblr seems to have given up on using ActivityPub.

Shizuku + Canta on f-droid are great for accomplishing this as well, you just start wireless debugging and tick the apps you want to uninstall.

I deleted mine in January, after all the tech CEOs went to kiss the ring at the US inauguration. I don’t trust them at all to delete anything but at least they aren’t getting more data from me.

I’ve had my account since 2012 when I got a Nexus 4 so a lot of my life was tied up in it. It’s not something you can just up and decide to do one day and I’d been working my way to deletion since last summer and just went faster with the process in January. If you self-host things it makes it easier because there’s a lot of good replacements for their services e.g. nextcloud if you need an office suite, immich to replace Google photos. So I’ve got thirteen years of my life backed up to a raspberry pi sitting under my TV instead of being mined on a google server to train an LLM.

The only issue I’ve had is my phone keeps complaining that I’m not signed in with a google account, and there’s a few email addresses I hadn’t updated from gmail to my new accounts. But it’s been surprisingly plain sailing without having an account, and at least one of those issues will be sorted by moving to a phone with custom ROM support.

That’s good to hear! I’ve ADBed almost all of the Google & Samsung stuff off my phone already so I’m well used to fighting with Aurora to download certain apps by now. Nearly all my apps are from F-droid as well so that will make the transition a lot easier, and I do a lot of self hosting so I’m not relying on any proprietary services that are going to demand play services be installed. Balatro on my steam deck already steals enough of my time, so honestly if my phone won’t let me install it that’s probably for the best.

Going from One UI 6 to One UI 7 on a Samsung has made me very excited to go get a used pixel or fairphone and install a custom ROM instead. Absolutely abysmal update.

I have an S24, Gemini can be safely removed using Canta but is sometimes reinstalled when Samsung push out updates which is annoying. You can disable the play store without causing a boot loop but as far as I can tell there’s no way around play services since it can’t be disabled. I’m just making do with this phone for now and plan to get something I can install a custom ROM on later but it really sucks.

Having a rescue dog of my own with behavioral issues made me appreciate Krypto a lot in this. James Gunn really nailed what it’s like to have one, he is an asshole but I love him still. Every time Krypto was on screen I was just thinking of similar things my own little monster has done in the past. Especially Krypto being hypnotised by squirrels, we can’t walk past a single squirrel in the park without him locking onto it. Not usually a huge superhero movie fan but I really liked this, feels like they had a good balance between action, humour, and nods towards real world events & David Corenswet was the perfect casting for Superman.