I sent my first email with Gmail on 24 December 2004. Big day. That was when Gmail was a beta, and you had to get an invitation to use it. Ooh, look at him. Gmail account.
Almost 22 years and 46,000 emails (and that’s just the ones I kept) later, I’m winding my Gmail account down, with other Google services I’ve used and paid for for several years. I’ve deleted most of my 37,000 photos from Google Photos, moving them to Ente. I’ve deleted what was on Google Drive, moving my files, along with more of my personal email, to Proton. I moved my work email and calendar to Proton months ago.
I probably won’t kill my Google account altogether. It will exist like an archive. But I don’t want to pay for it any more, and certainly not when the alternatives are as good as they are, getting better all the time, and Google and other services continue to move further away from usefulness, do more to frustrate me, and cosy up to the psychopath in the White House. And Gemini can absolutely get in the sea.
I’m generally shuffling my online life around a bit – de-Googling, and using ever fewer US or enshittified digital services in favour of mainly European and privacy-respecting ones. My Bluesky profile is now hosted on European infrastructure with Eurosky. Making that switch is straightforward and didn’t lose any of my media, posts or connections. That’s how it’s supposed to be. Portability.
What feels important – redundancy and portability. To not entirely trust anything to keep my things safe. To keep a copy of what I own somewhere I can always lay my hands on it, online and offline. And to be able to move it if a platform or service doesn’t work for me any more. I forgot that for a long time. So an old NAS drive has been resurrected, and I have backups of everything, online and on physical media. I’ve rediscovered my MP3 collection, lovingly built over many years. I’ve got MP3s you can’t find on Spotify (I deleted that account as well). More of what I post on social will originate here.
I’m grateful to Doug Belshaw for two solid principles to work to – ROOTS (Return Old Online Things to your own Site) inspired as it was by POSSE (Publish on your own, syndicate elsewhere). With my digital things, I’m adding GRAB it (as a pnemonic it will have to do for the moment) – Guard, Retain, Archive, Back Up.
I can do these things and move away from US tech for myself; what’s not happening any time soon is friends or whole groups moving from WhatsApp to Signal, or clients moving away from so many painful Sharepoint sites. At least, not yet. If you’re thinking about doing it, just start. There are so many really solid alternatives now, and even just switching your search engine is something.