My Big Tech Exodus

Over the last two years I've recovered the capacity in my personal life to think about my dependency on the big tech companies and to start exploring and migrating to alternatives.

Part of my motivations are to be voting with my wallet against enshittification, partly in response to increasing geopolitical uncertainty, and partly to be an example that it's possible to reduce the amount of big tech in your life.

In the spirit of the latter, I wanted to share my progress so far. Importantly, this has been an incremental migration, there's still plenty to go, and my alternatives for my needs won't be the ideal alternative for everyone, but they may prompt you to consider options you hadn't yet.

So, in no particular order, these are the big tech services I've managed to replace, and their replacements:

• Amazon S3: Backblaze B2, primarily for offsite backups via Restic
• Amazon Shopping: I've cancelled Prime and will shop anywhere else first
• GitHub: Self-hosted Forgejo mirrored to Codeberg and some GitLab
• GitHub Pages: Codeberg Pages
• Google Chrome: Mozilla Firefox
• Google Search: Kagi
• Google Workspace (i.e. mail, calendar, contacts): mailbox.org
• Facebook Messenger: Signal
• Microsoft Office, Google Docs, Google Sheets: LibreOffice although I rarely use office apps.
• Microsoft Outlook: Mozilla Thunderbird
• Microsoft Windows: Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop which I detail further here.
• Reddit: Lemmy
• Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive: OpenCloud (self-hosted)
• Google Keep: Joplin synchronized to OpenCloud
• Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter: Mastodon

It's also worth noting the big tech dependencies I haven't yet managed to replace:

• Youtube, but I am a also Nebula subscriber
• Youtube Music, but it did enable me to cancel Spotify
• LinkedIn, but I only use it for contacts, not for the social feed. I have transferred my résumé to this blog.
• Google Maps, I have tried CoMaps but the map data lacks street numbers for the majority of my area.
• Google Nest, my home has Nest Protect Smart Smoke Alarms.
• Google Pixel phone. I have installed GrapheneOS on an spare device but haven't made the switch yet, primarily due to Youtube Music and Google Maps.
• Microsoft VSCode. I tried VSCodium but had issues with the extension marketplace.
• Amazon Audible, although I barely use it, so it's a low priority
• Netflix, and other streaming services - I haven't replaced these entirely but I have significantly reduced my usage by buying DVDs and Blu-rays again and hosting them on an old laptop running Jellyfin

I'm fortunate to have exited the Apple ecosystem around the iPhone 5 era so I haven't had to tackle anything Apple related.

At work, I'm lucky my big tech exposure is also limited to Outlook Web Access and WhatsApp for daily comms, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom for video calls, and they use Zulip instead of Slack.

Updated 2026-08-03: Added Google Maps, LinkedIn, and work notes. Updated 2026-08-06: Added Google Nest. Updated 2026-08-09: Replaced Google Keep. Added Jellyfin, Restic.