Untangled

Shedding Big Tech Stuff

Over the past few months, I've been dealing with a notification in my Gmail account that I've run out of space. At some point, they were threatening to stop delivering my email in a matter of days if I didn't either make space or pony up for whatever cloud storage fee they're trying to upsell. Umm. Don't threaten me with a good time?

Cloud

So I've had a Gmail account that I have been using for over 20 years. I also used Google Photos to store some high quality wedding pictures (which are also somewhere on a drive?), and was my main backup until a year or two ago, when I switched to Amazon Photos as my main backup solution.

From time to time, I've purged a few emails here and there, some with unnecessary attachments, and so on... playing whack-a-mole with Google's attempts at upselling me cloud storage.

Down to Earth

With the current state of DOOM that's pretty much all over the news, I find it somewhat therapeutic thinking about how I can do something that is both useful and enjoyable.

It's hard.

But I got to thinking that right around now would be a great time to try and shed some of my overdependence on big tech solutions designed to both make our lives a little easier and make society at large the hellscape we find ourselves in.

Maybe my "drop in the bucket" approach to doing something is not enough, but at least it's something!

Not Being the Product

So for the first time in my life, I decided to do something absurd.

Pay for email.

Well, directly, that is. I think we technically paid for email when we were suckered into signing up for America Online.

Wow, times have changed. (Does anyone else remember playing frisbee with those discs?)

I decided to go with Tuta.

They tout end-to-end encryption and are located in Germany, meaning some of those sweet, sweet GDPR protections.

There is a free tier, up to 1GB, but part of my doing something involves paying for a product, not being the product.

And plus. I have a lot of emails.

One thing to keep in mind, though, is that because Tuta touts end-to-end encryption, that means no POP3 or IMAP, so I'm still uncertain about transferring some old emails to the new service. (I downloaded all my emails from Gmail locally because, yeah... I actually have tons of good stuff in there 😁)

There is a desktop application I have yet to try out, and I'm using the Android app pretty seamlessly.

Rabbit Hole

So, I don't really like to do things halfway, so I decided I also needed to purge my dependence on Google AND Amazon as my cloud storage solution for photos.

I am not in the iCloud ecosystem, so that wasn't really on the table for me... and still... big tech is big tech.

For that, I decided to get all my photos locally.

With Amazon, there is a desktop app that allows you to back them up locally (that took a really long time, I have over 100GBs of photos).

And then, because I'm a glutton for punishment, I decided to create my own server on Hetzner, which I had never used before, and spin up some docker containers (which I barely know how to do), to install PhotoPrism, an open source app to manage all my photos (definitely knew nothing about that).

Hetzner

Signing up for Hetzner itself was odd, in that they ask you to prove you are a human by uploading pictures of a legal document and a selfie, which I believe are reviewed by real humans.

But aside from that, pretty much what you would expect from a cloud platform.

They have some great plans available at reasonable costs, and they even have a preconfigured Ubuntu VM with everything you'd need to run PhotoPrism out of the box!

I did hit some snags, however.

First of all, I wanted to use an old domain I had sitting around, so I had to do some DNS things that I always forget how to do.

Once I was fairly certain that the DNS thing was done, I later realized that I had to manually set a Firewall setting with Hetzner for inbound traffic on the usual ports (thanks Jeff).

Then, I learned that the reverse proxy for one of the containers was not working, and hence my PhotoPrism app was unreachable.

What is a reverse proxy, you may ask?

I have no idea.

The preconfigured containers were using Traefik for proxy shenanigans, and after some honing in on error logs, I found that it wasn't doing what it was supposed to be doing.

So I located the docker-compose.yaml file that is used to spin up these docker containers and I stripped out the Traefik stuff and inserted some Caddy stuff. (Thanks again, Jeff!)

What is Caddy, you may ask?

I also have no idea.

My DevOps knowledge does not run deep.

However, it was still just simple enough for me to swap out these two tools, reconfigure a couple things, and Voila! (Nothing is really simple, but you get the gist...)

I'm still working out some kinks, but I can now navigate to my PhotoPrism app using a domain I own and load pictures to it.

PhotoPrism

I haven't gotten around to actually using the app all that much just yet, but I've loaded about 30GBs worth of pictures and it seems to be handling everything pretty well.

The UI is pleasing... I actually enjoy using it more than the Amazon web UI, and apparently there's a PWA (progressive web app) for usage with my phone, but I haven't tried it yet.

A Few Other Things

A couple of weeks ago, I also signed up for Signal, but I haven't been able to actually use it much, for lack of convincing other people to use it? Either way, it feels good to have.

A while ago, I decided to delete my old Twitter account because dumpster 🔥... I had kept it dormant for a long time, but really just wanted to be as far away from it as possible.

And I've been using Vivaldi and DuckDuckGo as my daily driver for browsing and search for quite some time now.

Edit: Ooh, I initially forgot to mention here that I also opened up a Codeberg account and have been using it to work on my latest project, League Manager.

Denouement

This isn't really something that you just do, and then you're done.

It feels like an ongoing commitment to really think about the products I use.

I used to think that if something was "free", like email, or "fake free", like unlimited photo storage with an Amazon Prime subscription--that I should take advantage of it as much as possible.

All that while, I realize that we, as consumers, were the ones that were being taken advantage of.

Hopefully going forward, I've learned to be a little more conscientious about choosing the services I use.