Liberating myself from being continuously logged in to Reddit turned out to be easy: multireddits work perfectly fine as a substitute for subscriptions. Obviously I still need my account to manage the subreddits, but luckily I already used to do that rarely prior to this: I’m pretty conservative in my new subscriptions, and I usually throw out old unwanted ones en masse once or twice a year.<\/p>\n
The only extraneous feature I used was my own link-shortening system, to give the new multireddit a nice little mnemonic.<\/p>\n
This has left me pondering more and more about the practicalities of getting off Google, which now remains as the most pressing obstacle. Since leaving Ubuntu One, I’ve used Owncloud for file syncing, so that’s already covered. But I still find myself using Google Docs for some reason; I’ve never tried replacing it with Owncloud’s documents add-on.<\/p>\n
I have experimented with Owncloud’s calendar add-on though, and IIRC it worked just fine. But I stopped using it because I wasn’t trying to replace Google at the time.<\/p>\n
And I haven’t even touched on email, probably the biggest part of the hypothetical goodbye-Google for me.<\/p>\n
But there’s also a bigger logistical obstacle than the nitty-gritty practical details: I have an Android phone, and the wins of giving up Google on the desktop would be rendered null if, simultaneously, I’d still stick to OEM Android on the phone.<\/p>\n
I have already been contemplating rooting the phone for a custom ROM due to unrelated reasons (the manufacturer will not be providing updates beyond L), so there’s a theoretical possibility of trying to go Google-free on the phone too. For reasons, I imagine it a much more crippling experience than on the desktop. The alternative would be to remain with Google on the phone, which, for honesty’s sake, should mean giving up (i.e. keeping Google) on the desktop too. Also, if I were to ditch Google on the phone, it might ultimately be better achieved by switching to a Lumia.<\/p>\n
If I had to keep one login as daily procedure, Google would have to be it. It yields the biggest gains by far. And truth be told, one login isn’t so bad, not even with two-factor verification. If logins were the only reason, I’d definitely not bother with this. But there are bigger, better reasons for trying to go Google-free. Reasons that go beyond the overarching theme of this blog, which is just “how to simplify my day-to-day web browsing”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Liberating myself from Reddit logins turned out to be easy. Pondering more and more about the practicalities of getting off Google now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[589,13649,11968],"class_list":["post-3728","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-google","tag-lumia","tag-reddit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/nuudelisoppa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/nuudelisoppa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/nuudelisoppa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/nuudelisoppa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/nuudelisoppa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3728"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/nuudelisoppa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3728\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/nuudelisoppa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/nuudelisoppa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mummila.net\/nuudelisoppa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}