Big Tech Update

Series: Big Tech Alternatives

tl;dr: An update on the state of my efforts to move away from US Big Tech.

Tags: Tech and Society

Today the US trade war on Canada stepped up to another level, so I thought it was a good day to do a recap on the state of some of my efforts to rely less on US Big Tech which as Pope Leo among others have pointed out are now the primary engine for a new form of digital colonialism.

I'll break these down into status or rationale categories rather than technical ones.

Already Happy

Some of the tech choices I was already happy with as not giant US tech companies:

  • Signal for private messages
  • 1Password for password manager
  • Nebula for independent video content creators
  • Kobo for eBooks, including ones from the library
  • Libby with my library card for audiobooks
  • Hoopla for some movies from the library
  • Mastodon, Pixelfed, Bluesky, and maybe occasionally Loops for federated social media

Moved Recently

The major changes I've made in the past year or so are:

  • Personal code repos from GitHub to Codeberg.
  • Personal email from Microsoft Outlook to Proton.
  • Personal browser from Edge to Waterfox. I also tried Vivaldi for a while but their vertical tabs implementation is much worse. Waterfox (or Firefox) feels like it is a more consistently good experience for me.
  • Personal search engine from Bing to Qwant. I also tried Kagi for the free trial but didn't quite feel justified paying for a subscription. I talked about types of search a while ago and I concluded there that Bing is best for the quick results like sports scores, Kagi was best for getting to a specific site that you know keywords for, and an LLM is best for complicated problem solving or summarizing commonly available information. Qwant only replaces Kagi for that second type of keyword search, and even that I'm not going as far as saying Qwant is better, just that it is good enough for something I need rarely enough that I don't feel justified paying for Kagi. Losing some of the value of the Bing quick answers is not a huge deal, as the Qwant results will usually just show me a link to something that has what I want.

Shared With Others

These ones are still a maybe, but they impact more than just me. That means they require subjecting those who are less quick to adapt to their important tech suddenly being very different, so must be undertaken a lot more carefully. That includes:

  • A shared Microsoft email
  • Shared file storage in OneDrive
  • Desktop document editing with the Microsoft 365 suite

The former two could be moved to Proton and it would make my life easier since I am now in Proton for my own individual email, but would require a transition for others. The latter could be moved to LibreOffice.

Music streaming is another one worth noting here. There is a Canadian service Stingray but it is very different, providing human-curated radio stations rather than full control over playlists and exactly what you want to listen to right now on demand. This would not be a big loss for me, who tends to just hit one of the playlist buttons in YouTube Music anyway, but it would be a big loss for the more heavy music listener of the house who likes to curate her own lists.

Self-Hosted

Things I still would like and realistically probably could do with some upfront costs is the self hosted category:

  • Replace Google Home with Home Assistant. This could be a phased or partial transition, as that is the kind of thing you can set up the new thing without shutting down the old one entirely. Perhaps I find that I can't adequately replace the smart display with photos from Google as a screensaver, but I could other functions.
  • Add a Pi Hole for network wide ad blocking that would help protect other devices at home like the smart TV.
  • Set up a local LLM server.

Other than time, the big reason I haven't done those is because the ideal is one machine that does them all, but getting one powerful enough to do the LLM part ramps the price way up especially as RAM prices continue to skyrocket. I need to decide whether to buy cheaper devices for the first two and then revisit an LLM server later, or keep waiting to try to do it all at once.

The Operating Systems

The last one that I initially considered more hassle than it was worth but has been slowly growing on me since: I could switch my Pixel to GrapheneOS. It's a big gamble to change something so fundamental to the most important personal device, but if it pays off, that's also the biggest privacy win by a lot.

I'm not realistically going to change my home computer to Linux. I probably could handle it and it might even make some of my common needs from a computer (Docker virtualization) easier. My wife couldn't. We share one main computer.

Work

I also haven't changed much of my work processes. Most of those I don't have the power to decide. I could change my browser and my search engine but that's about it, and honestly, working as a web developer I do feel it is a requirement to start with something Chromium to best represent what the majority of the audience with experience. Fine, Microsoft will get lots of data from the work I do, but at least that is far from the more personal information.

What Would That Leave?

Suppose I could follow through on all the shared things and self-hosted things as well as GrapheneOS noted above. What that would leave me with from the US Big Tech companies among my personal (not work) tech:

  • Microsoft: Windows, Xbox, LinkedIn
  • Google: Android TV (but with Pi Hole ad blocking), maybe some other smart home components still, occasional YouTube
  • Amazon and Apple: just their streaming video services. Ditto for Netflix and Disney if we want to include them as US Big Tech.

Rabbit Hole