De-googling συζήτηση, όχι οδηγός

finally i have unplugged myself from the cloud….

i quit google drive about a month ago. not for ideology at first, just got tired of everything i make sitting on someone else’s server being read by bots i’ll never see.

built a nextcloud box out of a recycled dell optiplex. 2tb drive, debian, fail2ban, vpn back to my phone. cost me a weekend and maybe forty bucks. it hums in the corner now like a little altar to not trusting corporations with my brain.

first week felt good. like i’d unplugged something that had been siphoning me dry without my noticing. synced my phone, moved my files, set up encrypted backups to an external drive in a fireproof box under my desk.

then the withdrawal hit.

not technical. psychological. i’d be at a coffee shop and reach for a file and remember it was at home. my server was at home. i wasn’t. for fifteen years i could access anything, anywhere, instantly. now i had to plan. think about what i’d need before leaving. felt like carrying a physical notebook again, but worse, because i knew the infrastructure still existed and i’d locked myself out on purpose.

second break was sharing. sent a friend a doc link out of habit. except now it’s a nextcloud url that needs an account or a download. he asked me to just email it. i did. felt like losing.

third was photos. used to auto-upload to google photos where the ai would tag faces, let me search “sunset” or “dog” and pull up six years of shots. now they pile up in folders and i have to remember filenames. looking into photoprism but it’s not the same. i’m the curator now. more work.

biggest break was realizing how much i’d outsourced my own memory. google remembered for me. now i’m relearning how to keep a mental index. it’s slower. frustrating. but it’s mine.

not going back though. added redundancy since then. second backup at a friend’s place, rsync jobs nightly, encrypted offsite copies. system’s stronger now. but the withdrawal’s real. your brain gets wired to the cloud the same way it does to nicotine or doomscrolling. you don’t notice till you stop.

if you’re thinking about it: start small. one service at a time. documents, then photos, then email if you’re brave. don’t rip it all out at once or you’ll break your workflows and crawl back in a week. build the setup first. migrate slow. accept that some things will be less convenient. that’s the cost.

for me it was worth it. my data lives in a box i can touch now. if it dies it’s because i fucked up, not because some tos changed or an algorithm flagged my account.

anyone else try this? what’s your setup look like?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​