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I Stopped Trusting Big Tech

The tools we use every day aren't free. We pay with our data, our attention, and our trust. Here's what I use instead.

I Stopped Trusting Big Tech

The tools we use every day—Google, Microsoft, the defaults—aren't free. We pay with our data, our attention, and our trust. But we have other options.

I was attending college in Minnesota when I first heard about Google. A simple web page with a single text box and a button. Before that, I used Lycos and Ask Jeeves.

Google’s home page was a statement, it was there only to help you find what you were looking for and it promised to do it fast and accurately, without spamming you with graphics and Ads to other websites. Remember the phrase “Don’t be evil”? The phrase originated from the 2004 IPO prospectus and was a staple of the company's code of conduct, emphasizing that ads should be clearly labeled and not influence search results. I think we can all agree that this is not their philosophy anymore.

What changed? Enshittification. They stopped serving users and started serving advertisers. Little by little, I have been trying to move away from big tech’s software, as I’ve been trying to have more control of my websites, the applications I use, and my own data. The enshittification of these wonderful services from the likes of Google, Microsoft, Etc. is a reality, and it’s pushing people like me and many others to try alternatives.

WordPress to Ghost

One of the big changes for me was switching from hosting my personal site (the website you are reading now) in WordPress.com to a self-hosted Ghost instance. I rent a virtual machine on DigitalOcean, and installed a Ghost instance in it. I don’t have to pay a subscription to gain access to features or have the limitations that WordPress impose depending on your subscription type. I can install anything I want, and run it as I wish, it’s my personal server and website on the internet.

Google Domains to Porkbun

Like many people working in tech, I have a long list of domain names I’ve acquired over the years. This is the result of thinking of ideas, and buying domain names that will host these ideas, with the thinking that they could become something one day. All my domain names were hosted by Namesecure many years ago, but as soon as Google offered domain name hosting, I switched to them, I trusted them. However, on June 2023, Google announced that they were going to stop offering this service, so after looking for options, I landed on Porkbun.com — which I learned about from reading Derek Sivers’ Tech Independence post, which I highly recommend. Porkbun is an independent domain name registrar company based in Oregon, and so far, it’s been a great place to register and host my domain names.

Gmail to Fastmail

This is also the reason why years ago I started paying for email. I’ve always had free email accounts, first with Hotmail (which became Outlook), then Yahoo, and the Gmail. But the truth is that this service isn’t free, if you are not paying for it, then your data is likely to be part of the products they sell to advertisers. I haven’t completely switched to my paid email provider, but I am close to it. I got a few email accounts with Fastmail and little by little, I’m replacing my Gmail accounts with the ones in Fastmail.

Google Workspace to LibreOffice

Then we have Google Docs and Sheets. Many years ago I started tinkering with Linux, and this brought me to an open source Office Suite called Libre Office. This is free open source software that you can use to replace MS Word, Google Docs, MS Excel, Google Sheets, MS PowerPoint, etc. It is a full office suite, and it’s compatible with documents created in the MS Office suite or Google’s.

I am not preaching, these are just the choices I’ve made. You have choices too.

What I use now:

Today’s default options aren't the only option. And the price of 'free' is higher than it looks.