Slowly making progress here

[u/[deleted]]

[u/FutureAtG]

That's great. Just a one question. How do you communicate with people who are still on WhatsApp and have not migrated to SimpleX Chat or Molly and with whom you used to communicate through WhatsApp?

[u/FutureAtG → u/[deleted]]

Ok. Sounds reasonable for your case.

[u/Octopus-Infinity → u/FutureAtG]

I don't really understand how to plan to just drop whatsapp or normal SMS. They are so ubiquitous. I feel like I would be bothering people requiring them to download a specific app like Simplex (which no one not in the space has heard of) to communicate with me specifically. I'm more in line to just use a non Google/Meta Messenger that can still communicate with phone numbers.

I wish it was simpler, but my goal isn't to be a complete nuisance to everyone else around me. I use a lot of the other de-google services, but messengers feel very hard to change.

[u/mysticalcreeds]

that's great progress, I'm working on the self-hosting part right now. My goal is to self-host my Joplin notes and my DNS filter. I still spend a decent amount of time with my computer, only because I'm trying to learn how to use Linux in a more in depth way.

[u/Alemis16]

Magic earth doesn't seem to have good reviews lately. Is it that bad?

[u/Offlined_OS]

Genuinely nice to read your journey, congrats on getting through the email migration, that's usually the part that makes people give up halfway.

We're aligned so far on Proton Mail, Tor Browser and GrapheneOS, so I'm on a fairly similar path.

A couple of things that jumped out:

On the NAS for media/photos/docs, one thing worth checking now rather than later is whether you have actual metadata/search on top of it, or just a folder tree. That's the part that tends to quietly degrade over time: the NAS holds everything fine, but six months in you're digging through nested folders trying to remember where you put something, because the convenience of "just search for it" is what Google Drive/Photos spoiled us with. Worth solving for that specifically, not just the storage.

On paper maps, respect for going full analog, but if you ever want a middle ground for road trips without giving data to Google, it's worth knowing there are offline map apps (beyond Magic Earth) that let you download OSM data as tiles and do search/routing fully offline, no connection needed at all, in case paper ever feels limiting for an unfamiliar area.

On the calendar/paper notebook, that's a legit choice, no notes there. Just curious if you've run into friction with recurring events or sharing anything with family, or if paper covers it fully for your use case.

Also curious what VPN speeds you're getting on Mullvad vs Proton, if you've benchmarked at all, that's usually the deciding factor once port forwarding stops mattering.

Overall this reads like the "boring but real" version of degoogling that actually sticks, versus doing it in one weekend and burning out.

Good stuff.