Taking the Final Step to De-Google
A couple of years ago, I spent what felt like months slowly transitioning from my Gmail account to Fastmail. I have absolutely no regrets and my Gmail account only occasionally gets a spam email here or there. The only reason I kept up my Google account was for my YouTube account, which I had a cheap subscription to YouTube Premium thanks to a VPN. I'm not one to follow many channels, but it was nice having it on my TV to watch new movie trailers and game trailers and such.
My father decided to subscribe to YouTube TV and shared his account with me. I really liked their TV package, and it was great for a couple of years until he began having some difficulties with the billing. YouTube doesn't have a support number to call and after several months of being double charged he finally cancelled his subscription along with it his YouTube Premium which he was sharing with me. I, unfortunately, had cancelled my VPN assisted Premium account just a couple of months ago.
Google has smartened up and made it more difficult to get a cheap Premium account and $20 is absolutely bonkers for what they offer, so this pretty much ruined my YouTube experience as I'm not going to watch the absurd amount of ads they push on their videos. I managed to set up a workaround using Invidious on my Apple TV, but I have no need for the YouTube App nor YouTube in general these days.
Unfortunately, Google pretty much requires you to have the YouTube app to verify your account, which is something I ran into earlier today. I got so pissed off I had to download YouTube just to select a stupid number that I knew it was time to put YouTube and Google out to the pasture.
I went through and backed up a handful of videos I had uploaded for my wife on YouTube and then gutted it. Afterwards, I took the axe to what little bit I had on Google Drive where my only true loss was the syncing I got from the FBReader. Then I hit the handful of pictures I had left on Google Photos, mostly leftover from old blogs. And now I have basically nothing associated with my twenty year old Google account. I'm going to give it another day just to make sure I'm not forgetting anything, but then disassociating myself from Google for good.
While I'm axing off terrible products that don't serve me, I'm going to go ahead and finally close out that Instagram I stupidly reopened last year. I had to create a Facebook account, just so I could have an Instagram account again and while the Facebook has remained empty and unused I did use Instagram for a bit. Then earlier this week, I found a few groups on Facebook I wanted to follow (Roman History/World History) and suddenly Facebook has decided I need to fight against wokeness and despite my attempts to block the suggestions, they just keep coming. I have no friends on my account nor any likes outside two groups I follow that don't have any content similar to that. I'm done, what a fucking waste.