redefining "convenience"
By far the most common pushback I get when I talk about my recent divorce from Big Tech is "but it's so convenient!" "It" being Google services, Apple services, Microsoft, or Meta, mostly. (Absolutely no one I have talked to claims Twitter is "convenient," even if they're still on Twitter.)
I thought so too, once. It's how I ended up in them. The farther I get from Big Tech, however, the more I'm asking: convenient for whom and for what? What does the tech do, who does it do it for, and who does it do it to?
At first, I thought divorcing Big Tech meant rejecting convenience entirely. Now I realize: it actually means making the tools I use convenient for me, not for their creators.
Some examples:
Google Drive/Gmail versus separate services
Proton Mail has an associated Proton Drive, which fulfills basically the same functions as Google Drive. However, I didn't start using Proton Drive when I switched to Proton Mail. I opted for CryptPad instead.
Using Gmail and Google Drive together is "convenient" for the user. You can open attachments in Gmail and save them straight to your Google Drive, for instance. I can't do that with Proton Mail and CryptPad. Instead, I have to download the attachment and then upload it.
CryptPad, unlike Google products, has zero options for password recovery. if I manage to forget my password, everything in my CryptPad is gone forever. That could be extremely inconvenient to me.
On top of this, not all my email even goes to my Proton address! I actually have four separate accounts with four separate providers (none of which are Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo). Each account handles different levels of necessary security, from "actual trash" to "emails containing info about my health, finances, family, and/or religious leanings."
But here's what makes my current setup convenient to me:
It's a lot harder for a government to get at. Proton's CEO may be sucking up to the current US regime, but Proton itself is based in Switzerland. Switzerland, like the honey badger, does not give a shit about foreign warrants. There's only one government that can get my Proton Mail account, and that's the Swiss. And apart from one email account, I have no connections to Switzerland. If the feds wanted my emails from Google, however, they'd have but to ask. Similarly, CryptPad is based in France - a country slightly easier for the US government to work with, but they're still dealing with encrypted data.
CryptPad offers a relatively small 1 GB of file storage. It's relatively slow at hashing passwords and de-encrypting files on login. All this reminds me that my files are on someone else's computer - which is all "the cloud" is. Thus, I keep only what I currently need to access on CryptPad. When I'm done with a file, I download it to a flash drive and delete it from CryptPad. Once it's deleted from CryptPad, it's gone. There's no evidence the same can be said for Google.
If someone got my Google password back in the day, they'd have access to everything - my email, years of documents, text messages, photos, YouTube history, Maps history...you name it. Today, someone who has my Proton Mail login doesn't even have all my email, let alone anything else. Accessed my CryptPad? Congrats, please enjoy this .txt document containing the html for the latest version of my homepage index. You could have just right-clicked for that, you know.
No one service is able to build a profile now to serve me increasingly invasive ads, train an AI off my labor, or press me into digital sharecropping. And data ages quickly. The longer I avoid contact with Big Tech companies, the less valuable their existing data becomes.
Google had orders of magnitude more information on me than any one service has now. That is extremely convenient. To me.
frogfind.com with Lynx
Frogfind.com is a search engine that strips out everything but text and hyperlinks. It's ideal for use with Lynx or other command-line search functions.
Because Frogfind won't load anything but text and hyperlinks, it breaks a lot of Web pages. Sometimes, it breaks so much of a page that it renders the page unusable. Surely this is "inconvenient," right?
...Here's the thing: if a Web page doesn't work in Lynx, it doesn't work for the visitor. It may be serving a million ads, tracking your every move, or doing a lot of other things that work great for the site's owner. But it's not convenient for the reader.
Frogfind and Lynx save me again and again from having to deal with sites that look like the late stages of Stimulation Clicker. When I want to read text, it only serves text. That's extremely convenient to me.
Even better: Lynx doesn't load trackers. Lynx doesn't load trackers because it can't. It cannot recognize most trackers as loadable. So long, Meta Pixel.
The only tracker-type item it can come close to loading is cookies, which it offers the user a chance to accept or reject individually. None of this "you can't reject necessary cookies" nonsense.
(Some pages do break if you reject all cookies. But the user gets the option. We shouldn't live in a country that offers 80 kinds of dish soap but no opportunity to reject cookies even if they break the page.)
Sure, sometimes I can't read a page in Lynx. When this happens, I have to find another way to read it or find another page. But knowing I can just read text and that absolutely no one can gather data on me while I do? Very convenient to me.
Cloud Firewall and OpenSnitch
The Cloud Firewall extension for Firefox (and LibreWolf) allows you to block pages served on/with Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, or Cloudflare. When you toggle it to block these pages, the pages will not load. At all. You just get a popup that reminds you that you chose to block pages from that provider.
Cloud Firewall breaks a huge percentage of Web sites. I was astonished how many sites I frequented actually use Cloudflare, for instance. The only essential page it's broken for me so far is my bank's, but this is why I also have Ungoogled Chromium.
OpenSnitch is a Linux program that tells you every single time your computer tries to send information over the Internet. The initial run of this tool is...a lot. Over time, it learns what you do and don't accept, and it settles down. At first, though, its interruptions are constant.
I love them both. One of the things I like least about my work computer is that I have to do without either. I would rather know who is behind the Web sites I visit. I want to know when those sites, or my computer, try to respond to information requests from those sites. Knowing when a site runs on some Big Tech company's stuff or when it's trying to send info is very convenient to me.
gemtext
Gemtext is how one formats text files for Geminispace. It's basically stripped-down Markdown (the stuff you use to format blog posts on Bear).
Once upon a time, WYSIWYG editors were introduced to make marking up text with HTML more "convenient." You can just open the editor and type, and it does all the little pointy bracket tags for you! How convenient!
...Reader, I have always disliked WYSIWYG editors. Writing my own HTML structures my thinking. It allows me to ensure the HTML conveys the meaning of my work and not just the formatting.
I infinitely prefer Gemtext.
Gemtext has maybe half the options Markdown does. There's no bold, italic, or underline, for instance. There are only three levels of heading and only unordered (bullet-point) lists. Block quotes are an option. Links can only go on their own line. That's about it.
Yes, Gemtext gives me less control over semantics than HTML. But Gemtext, by disallowing semantic and styling tags, forces me to think about the structure of my writing as well as its sense. The restrictions are freeing.
I'm currently working on setting up space on a tilde server so I can run my Gemini capsule directly from the command line.
Ubuntu
Sure, a lot of things in Ubuntu can be done through the GUI, which makes them feel more like one would do them in Windows. But a lot of things can't. For instance, I've loaded far more programs from the terminal than I have from the app service. Some things simply don't exist any other way.
Having to type "sudo apt-get install" to install a program took learning. Learning where to look for programs and what programs I wanted and what to type to get them was a process, too. But I'm completely free of Windows now - an OS that is offensive to use even when it's been debloated to its bare essentials. Having two sets of OS skills is pretty convenient to me.
phone
See also: ditching the Google Play store for F-Droid and Aurora OSS. Some things load weird. One app I discovered would not run without the Play Store's blessing at all. But being able to put apps on my phone without Google connecting them to me? Having access to a lot more app options via F-Droid than I would through Google Play? Pretty convenient to me. Less so for Google, which isn't getting a 30 percent cut from them, but I really don't care about Google.
Was learning all this "convenient"? Maybe not in the short term. But with so many tech companies showing their hands all at once, it's clearly more convenient to me and my privacy in the long term.
Bottom line: If a company is offering you "seamless," "frictionless" "convenience," there's something in it for them. You handing over your data is more convenient to them than it is to you. Do what is convenient for you - even if it means having to learn some new skills in the short term.