I am a phone scroller and social media reader and a YouTube watcher. My phone and by extension my Google account are my mobile office. I regret having to buy an Apple Mac Mini but I am not giving up Logic as my DAW. I got away from overpriced Samsung devices a few years ago and have a fairly bloat-free Motorola. Now I want to dump the Google ecosystem. I intend to download all of my pics and files from Drive and the Google cloud. I am not so tech savvy that I can install APKs or switch to Linux, and I’d like to watch video streamers that aren’t saturated in developer links (seriously, why do y’all do this?..just put one simple link to “Developer Info” or something and put all the other links there). I want to use and enjoy the net like any idiot would but without being The Product. I am Lemmy over Reddit (though you both ban me from subs with equal ferver); MeWe over Facebook (though MeWe is moving towards an unprivate model now); Mastodon over Xittstain. I have a ProtonMail account, but mainly for registrations…I have had a Gmail account since Earthlink took a nosedive.
What/who else is out there for me to frequent and replace all the corporatist models?in the past I tried Minds (all Nazis all the time!) and Ello (socmed for creative types, yet still looks like a shitty 1970’s mimeographed zine). I also spent a couple of years at one called MyBetzCo that started out okay but died because none of the members would make public posts for interacting with others.
What do you recommend for private/decentralizwd clouds, socmeds or media sites?
depending on where you are in phone replacement/upgrade cycle I would recommend Fairphone or looking into e/OS.
Like others mentioned don’t expect to do a wholesale jump. Slowly replace services with alternatives: Proton mail, NextCloud, Box, Dropbox, Lemmy, Mastodon to name a few services. There are numerous apps that can interact with those services so you’ll be spending some time going over those sorting what works for you.
To get the apps FDroid coupled with Aurora you can get most apps (that do not have explicit dependency on Googleware). Amazon App store is a possibility too for some commercial apps. For Youtube there are several alternatives like LibrePipe and NewPipe (but there are more). For existing social media site apps there are thin wrapper browsers that would “sandbox” each site allowing you to still use them while you slowly detach yourself: SlimSocial, RedReader, etc.
I’ve been Google-free for a bit now but I went with LineageOS+microG setup which may be challenging for you at this stage.
Treat it less as a crusade and more like multilevel challenge when upon completion of one challenge you get to complete another. It could be fun and liberating.