I try to do a lot of this, but it's rather exhausting and a moving target, due to acquisitions or shifting priorities and directions from various providers. When work and life get busy, I just don't have the energy for it.
I often envy the people who simply seem to not care or notice.
I've been trying to clean up my account sprawl for years. Every so often when I have some time off I'll try to tackle it. I think I've deleted over 100 accounts, but I still have over 300. It's a lot of work on some of these sites. I spent 45 minutes on hold with Sony just for them to tell me no and hang up on me before I could reply.
I've also tried moving off Gmail several times, but this usually just ends in more account sprawl... I now have 3 inboxes to manage. Rome wasn't built in a day, but 1500 years later the ruins remain. That's how migrating email feels to me. I don't think I can ever actually delete an email account I used for over 20 years. If I switch to another provider (or one I've already half moved to) what will they look like in another 20 years. With email being our identity online, it isn't so trivial, unless you've only ever signed up for 5 websites and a handful of people have your address. For some reason I have an issue with the idea of setting up a forwarder to push everything to one place. Pushing spam around just feels like it makes a bigger mess.
I acknowledge is hard, but everything worth in life seems to be, so fighting against what they try to shove down our throats seems to be the only meaningful way.
If I may give you a suggestion for how to get rid of GMail:
1. register your domain
2. either have the registrar redirect your emails to e.g. your Pronton address, or pay Pronto the 3$/month premium to host your domain emails directly. Nice benefit: you now have unlimited aliases for your @domain.tld domain
3. setup a redirect for all the other GMail / etc mailboxes to your new Proton account
In this way you won't lose any email and will start to advertise your own email address, which is also allegedly giving a more professional feeling that <something.something>@gmail.com for who's receiving it.
I went down that road before, it's how I started at Proton. I ended up with an .io TLD, which now has an uncertain future. Right now, I'm not too invested in it and I'm not sure I want to invest further in a TLD that could rug pull me in 10 years. I just spent several hours looking for a semi-decent .com (and to some extent .net/.org) I could live with and it's rough out there. Everything is being squatted on.
If I can find something, I'm not sure I want to stick with Proton. Their growth into new apps has felt pushy and spammy, there is a degree of lock-in where their apps are required (or a bridge), and search isn't the best. I was looking at Fastmail if I do make the jump, but that all hinges on finding a better domain situation I can live with for the next several decades. I think my current Proton subscription renews in December, so I should probably act now if I'm going to do something.
The unlimited aliases are kind of a gift and a curse. I always thought having a unique email for each site would be great, to figure out who is selling my info. However, keeping track of every address I gave out was tedious, and out of the 40 or so I did it for, I don't think I ever ran into an issue (which is good)... so it was a lot of work for little to no payoff. I did see that my adobe email got out there from using a +alias with Gmail years ago. With the new features that were added to Gmail and Proton to highlight newsletters and easily kill them, I was able to dramatically cleanup my inbox pretty quickly about a year ago. Though I suspect they just made a rule behind the scenes and didn't kill them at the source, which would be my preference.
With email, I do question if it's worth it. Even the privacy stuff that companies like Proton talk about... it's mostly marketing. Gmail controls a majority of email. When emailing anyone using Gmail, Google is still getting the email. The protections only exist if emailing Proton to Proton, which I've never done.
So it's hard... but is it worth it? That's a question I struggle with. I prefer my experience in Kagi to Google Search, and I like supporting a business model where I'm the customer instead of the product, but is my life materially better than someone who isn't up at 3:30am thinking about this stuff? My quiet rebellion feels insignificant.
I'm feeling like the guy in the middle right now, and have felt that way for many years now... https://imgflip.com/i/b329ok
It's really interesting to hear other experiences, I see this really goes deep for you... I guess I'm much less overthinking the whole issue than you are All my switching feels organic in retrospective and creating a Proton mail account + GMail forward didn't seem like a big deal at the time, it's not like you have to self host your SMTP server or similar effort after all.
I agree the "e2e-encrypted email" bit is mostly marketing until GMail keeps its dominion on the market, which might be still for a very long time, but that's entirely up to us. I have some contacts who use Proton and some not, in the same way I have contacts who use Signal and some who don't. It doesn't have to be a full victory for me to make the switch worth it, even if just a minority of the users, the ones that I care about, do jump on the wagon I consider that a full personal victory.
I really haven't felt the Proton marketing push either... actually quite the opposite! I found out they have now a Meet application by chance even after so many years being a paying customer. Not sure what "bridge" you're talking about, unless you refer to accessing encrypted mails via IMAP, which I don't do so I don't care, webapp or `brew install protonmail` or installing the iOS apps do the trick for me and I don't see how that can be a win for GMail, it's just a different app which looks similar, no? AFAIK you can use all Proton applications from any browser, the ones I use (mail, calendar and meet) definitely work on Firefox for me.
About the domain ragpull fear... that sounds very unlikely? I mean, unless you choose a very esoteric TLD the probability of Google automatically banning your account seems to be a much much higher one? but still, if you switch to another provider you don't really need to setup a fancy domain, you can still setup GMail forward etc to the new @pm.me address or else. By the way, the "receive wildcard domain emails" is also an opt-in in Protonmail, you don't get it enabled automatically, so shouldn't be a blocker in itself.
Probably I'm a much simpler minded person, my heuristic goes somehow like "do I hate the company? yes -> is there a decent alternative? -> yes -> use it"
Complain more so it reaches the people doing it, there are few alternatives, as illustrated by this very blog:
> Google is arguably THE ads business ... find way better than Google Search.... I’ve been using DuckDuckGo as default search engine since…
DDG relies a lot on Bing, from MS, and how does Bing earn money? "We run ads, senator"
And it's not "way better", cite at least a few search examples where you think it is
> few other alternatives which I haven’t tried, like Brave or Ecosia.
So even worse? At least try them before recommending!
> DDG relies a lot on Bing, from MS, and how does Bing earn money? "We run ads, senator" And it's not "way better", cite at least a few search examples where you think it is
Since long I just don't see any reason to try out another search, I just get the results I want in a single shot. Another thing I like with DDG is that it doesn't seem to return different results depending on the profile it has on you, like Google does, so the same search tend to be deterministic, and that's a value added for me, might not be what you want though.
> So even worse? At least try them before recommending!
Fair, instead of complaining about my ineptitude though you could enrich this conversation saying why you find them worse than Google. I still stand by it though: Google Search is the biggest evil by far so whatever is not that is worth a try in my opinion, can't hurt for sure.
DDG use location for customizing results, but even then search shouldn't be deterministic because index /algo change with time? Though definitely not as much as Google, which adds more personalization. Have you actually tested it, though, and found better results, or is that a conceptual value add?
> why you find them worse than Google
Because their index is smaller, so results you get in Google aren't found there. And there is no benefit in better filtering of seo/ai slop garbage. So the core function is worse.
Though I've not seriously used Ecosia, only DDG/Brave
And sorry, I don't remember the various examples I've compared them on, with Brave it was usually "found nothing useful, tried a few terms, still no, switch to Google, move on", so only remember that experience as being frequent enough
> worth a try in my opinion
Yet you haven't tried, so obviously it's not worth it in your opinion
That's my point, though: it doesn't need to be perfect to be worth the switch.
> Have you actually tested it, though, and found better results, or is that a conceptual value add?
I did at the beginning and, as also written in the article, I did fall back on GSearch results once in a while, but that faded away in time and never felt the need anymore. I like DDG results page almost perfectly: it returns good results, I guess Google might be better sometimes (and other worse) but I don't mind. I think you're missing the point I'm trying to make: there are alternatives that are good enough and, if you are not happy with the product (I was not with Google, and I'm still not and actually it even got worse, e.g. the stuffing of AI down my throat is honestly depressing) try another one.
To be clear, I'm not stating here that DDG has absolute better results, I'm saying it has an overall much better experience compared to GSearch in my case. I don't get the AI first crap, I don't get irrelevant ads results (or at least not that I notice), I get nice perks like keyboard navigation, at least less invasion of my privacy, and a better UX overall.
It seems like you're perfectly happy with Google Search and Alphabet's spying practices, and by all means that's all right as long as you are ok with it, just notice though that the article is not targeted to you.
> you're missing the point I'm trying to make: there are alternatives that are good enough
It's an empty point because you haven't even tested the alternatives!! And I'm not missing it, I address it directly: by * your own* criteria "ad business is bad" your suggested alternative fails, so it's not "good enough"
> It seems like you're perfectly happy with Google Search and Alphabet's spying practices,
It seems like when you have very weak arguments you go ad hominem and make up motivations. Likewise, you're perfectly happy with MS spying practices by supporting their Bing search engine
> It's an empty point because you haven't even tested the alternatives!! And I'm not missing it
You are still missing my point: I didn't like Google Search, I tried an alternative (DDG) which works perfectly fine for me, if that doesn't do for you maybe you might want to try other alternatives that I know exist but I don't have any need to try out myself because I'm perfectly happy with the alternative I already have.
> It seems like when you have very weak arguments you go ad hominem and make up motivations.
I think you're still misunderstanding here. I'm not putting any judgment neither in my article nor in my comments to you. I don't have the pretention to target all readers on the planet, it's expected that some are not targeted by my article(s), if you are happy with one specific solution you're most probably not whining about it being enshittified in the first place, hence my article isn't targeting you. I don't understand how nor why you interpret that as avoiding a critique, it's just stating the facts from my point of view.
I flip your last comment then: it seems to me that you're focussing on a very specific point made in the article (some alternatives for Search I didn't try myself) while glossing over the 99.9% of it. If your argument is "your examples suck" I accept it, I thank you for bringing in your experience in this discussion, and I'll try to do better next time... or maybe not, I'm still imperfect and lazy most of the time so shouldn't make any such promise!
The problem is scale. Trying to replace something
big like Reddit/Browser/some-huge-library requires
enormous resource investment which is inviting
the same forces that enshittified the original.
The original reddit was a link list with voting,
no comments/media/etc it was cheap, and as it grown
into social media giant with insane complexity, it became
much more expensive and slower to process(both on
client and server). But the users loved it, they
now don't need to host the video/image/comments elsewhere,
its all included inside the walled garden,
and reddit which was 100% links to outside resources
is now mostly self-contained media with
pictures, videos, blog posts(self.subreddit) being
most of content and hyperlinks to "outside" being
mostly mainstream "big websites" with social clout.
I agree that scale is one of the factors involved, and businesses tend to go down the Reddit way. That said I don't think it can be generalized to all the businesses out there, and a few of the examples I do, first of all Proton, seems to show to me that a differen kind of successful (albeit not über greedy and trillions-making) business model is possible.
It's probably more relevant for content, e.g. the massive amount of (good) content present in YouTube (and YT music) is the reason I'm willing to pay the premium price even if I have close to zero sympathy for Alphabet as a company. But for services like email, or products like a browser, I really don't care about scale at all, I just want it to work well and possibly don't spy on me to sell my data.
All good things to do, but I think a different Doctorow thing is worth citing here too:
"Shopping isn't politics" [0], which I would summarize as "Consumption choices are vastly inferior to actual politics, never pursue the first at the expense of the second."
Thanks for the link, I'll read it later on my Kindle with calm, seems interesting.
That said, I already tend to disagree with the title, for e.g. buying an electrical vehicle or a photovoltaic system for your home IS political, it sends a message that you're choosing a particular kind of technology which is arguably more sustainable, etc.
I try to do a lot of this, but it's rather exhausting and a moving target, due to acquisitions or shifting priorities and directions from various providers. When work and life get busy, I just don't have the energy for it.
I often envy the people who simply seem to not care or notice.
I've been trying to clean up my account sprawl for years. Every so often when I have some time off I'll try to tackle it. I think I've deleted over 100 accounts, but I still have over 300. It's a lot of work on some of these sites. I spent 45 minutes on hold with Sony just for them to tell me no and hang up on me before I could reply.
I've also tried moving off Gmail several times, but this usually just ends in more account sprawl... I now have 3 inboxes to manage. Rome wasn't built in a day, but 1500 years later the ruins remain. That's how migrating email feels to me. I don't think I can ever actually delete an email account I used for over 20 years. If I switch to another provider (or one I've already half moved to) what will they look like in another 20 years. With email being our identity online, it isn't so trivial, unless you've only ever signed up for 5 websites and a handful of people have your address. For some reason I have an issue with the idea of setting up a forwarder to push everything to one place. Pushing spam around just feels like it makes a bigger mess.
Thanks for the detailed reply.
I acknowledge is hard, but everything worth in life seems to be, so fighting against what they try to shove down our throats seems to be the only meaningful way.
If I may give you a suggestion for how to get rid of GMail:
1. register your domain 2. either have the registrar redirect your emails to e.g. your Pronton address, or pay Pronto the 3$/month premium to host your domain emails directly. Nice benefit: you now have unlimited aliases for your @domain.tld domain 3. setup a redirect for all the other GMail / etc mailboxes to your new Proton account
In this way you won't lose any email and will start to advertise your own email address, which is also allegedly giving a more professional feeling that <something.something>@gmail.com for who's receiving it.
I went down that road before, it's how I started at Proton. I ended up with an .io TLD, which now has an uncertain future. Right now, I'm not too invested in it and I'm not sure I want to invest further in a TLD that could rug pull me in 10 years. I just spent several hours looking for a semi-decent .com (and to some extent .net/.org) I could live with and it's rough out there. Everything is being squatted on.
If I can find something, I'm not sure I want to stick with Proton. Their growth into new apps has felt pushy and spammy, there is a degree of lock-in where their apps are required (or a bridge), and search isn't the best. I was looking at Fastmail if I do make the jump, but that all hinges on finding a better domain situation I can live with for the next several decades. I think my current Proton subscription renews in December, so I should probably act now if I'm going to do something.
The unlimited aliases are kind of a gift and a curse. I always thought having a unique email for each site would be great, to figure out who is selling my info. However, keeping track of every address I gave out was tedious, and out of the 40 or so I did it for, I don't think I ever ran into an issue (which is good)... so it was a lot of work for little to no payoff. I did see that my adobe email got out there from using a +alias with Gmail years ago. With the new features that were added to Gmail and Proton to highlight newsletters and easily kill them, I was able to dramatically cleanup my inbox pretty quickly about a year ago. Though I suspect they just made a rule behind the scenes and didn't kill them at the source, which would be my preference.
With email, I do question if it's worth it. Even the privacy stuff that companies like Proton talk about... it's mostly marketing. Gmail controls a majority of email. When emailing anyone using Gmail, Google is still getting the email. The protections only exist if emailing Proton to Proton, which I've never done.
So it's hard... but is it worth it? That's a question I struggle with. I prefer my experience in Kagi to Google Search, and I like supporting a business model where I'm the customer instead of the product, but is my life materially better than someone who isn't up at 3:30am thinking about this stuff? My quiet rebellion feels insignificant.
I'm feeling like the guy in the middle right now, and have felt that way for many years now... https://imgflip.com/i/b329ok
It's really interesting to hear other experiences, I see this really goes deep for you... I guess I'm much less overthinking the whole issue than you are All my switching feels organic in retrospective and creating a Proton mail account + GMail forward didn't seem like a big deal at the time, it's not like you have to self host your SMTP server or similar effort after all.
I agree the "e2e-encrypted email" bit is mostly marketing until GMail keeps its dominion on the market, which might be still for a very long time, but that's entirely up to us. I have some contacts who use Proton and some not, in the same way I have contacts who use Signal and some who don't. It doesn't have to be a full victory for me to make the switch worth it, even if just a minority of the users, the ones that I care about, do jump on the wagon I consider that a full personal victory.
I really haven't felt the Proton marketing push either... actually quite the opposite! I found out they have now a Meet application by chance even after so many years being a paying customer. Not sure what "bridge" you're talking about, unless you refer to accessing encrypted mails via IMAP, which I don't do so I don't care, webapp or `brew install protonmail` or installing the iOS apps do the trick for me and I don't see how that can be a win for GMail, it's just a different app which looks similar, no? AFAIK you can use all Proton applications from any browser, the ones I use (mail, calendar and meet) definitely work on Firefox for me.
About the domain ragpull fear... that sounds very unlikely? I mean, unless you choose a very esoteric TLD the probability of Google automatically banning your account seems to be a much much higher one? but still, if you switch to another provider you don't really need to setup a fancy domain, you can still setup GMail forward etc to the new @pm.me address or else. By the way, the "receive wildcard domain emails" is also an opt-in in Protonmail, you don't get it enabled automatically, so shouldn't be a blocker in itself.
Probably I'm a much simpler minded person, my heuristic goes somehow like "do I hate the company? yes -> is there a decent alternative? -> yes -> use it"
Complain more so it reaches the people doing it, there are few alternatives, as illustrated by this very blog:
> Google is arguably THE ads business ... find way better than Google Search.... I’ve been using DuckDuckGo as default search engine since…
DDG relies a lot on Bing, from MS, and how does Bing earn money? "We run ads, senator" And it's not "way better", cite at least a few search examples where you think it is
> few other alternatives which I haven’t tried, like Brave or Ecosia.
So even worse? At least try them before recommending!
> DDG relies a lot on Bing, from MS, and how does Bing earn money? "We run ads, senator" And it's not "way better", cite at least a few search examples where you think it is
Since long I just don't see any reason to try out another search, I just get the results I want in a single shot. Another thing I like with DDG is that it doesn't seem to return different results depending on the profile it has on you, like Google does, so the same search tend to be deterministic, and that's a value added for me, might not be what you want though.
> So even worse? At least try them before recommending!
Fair, instead of complaining about my ineptitude though you could enrich this conversation saying why you find them worse than Google. I still stand by it though: Google Search is the biggest evil by far so whatever is not that is worth a try in my opinion, can't hurt for sure.
DDG use location for customizing results, but even then search shouldn't be deterministic because index /algo change with time? Though definitely not as much as Google, which adds more personalization. Have you actually tested it, though, and found better results, or is that a conceptual value add?
> why you find them worse than Google
Because their index is smaller, so results you get in Google aren't found there. And there is no benefit in better filtering of seo/ai slop garbage. So the core function is worse. Though I've not seriously used Ecosia, only DDG/Brave And sorry, I don't remember the various examples I've compared them on, with Brave it was usually "found nothing useful, tried a few terms, still no, switch to Google, move on", so only remember that experience as being frequent enough
> worth a try in my opinion
Yet you haven't tried, so obviously it's not worth it in your opinion
> Though definitely not as much as Google
That's my point, though: it doesn't need to be perfect to be worth the switch.
> Have you actually tested it, though, and found better results, or is that a conceptual value add?
I did at the beginning and, as also written in the article, I did fall back on GSearch results once in a while, but that faded away in time and never felt the need anymore. I like DDG results page almost perfectly: it returns good results, I guess Google might be better sometimes (and other worse) but I don't mind. I think you're missing the point I'm trying to make: there are alternatives that are good enough and, if you are not happy with the product (I was not with Google, and I'm still not and actually it even got worse, e.g. the stuffing of AI down my throat is honestly depressing) try another one.
To be clear, I'm not stating here that DDG has absolute better results, I'm saying it has an overall much better experience compared to GSearch in my case. I don't get the AI first crap, I don't get irrelevant ads results (or at least not that I notice), I get nice perks like keyboard navigation, at least less invasion of my privacy, and a better UX overall.
It seems like you're perfectly happy with Google Search and Alphabet's spying practices, and by all means that's all right as long as you are ok with it, just notice though that the article is not targeted to you.
> you're missing the point I'm trying to make: there are alternatives that are good enough
It's an empty point because you haven't even tested the alternatives!! And I'm not missing it, I address it directly: by * your own* criteria "ad business is bad" your suggested alternative fails, so it's not "good enough"
> It seems like you're perfectly happy with Google Search and Alphabet's spying practices,
It seems like when you have very weak arguments you go ad hominem and make up motivations. Likewise, you're perfectly happy with MS spying practices by supporting their Bing search engine
> It's an empty point because you haven't even tested the alternatives!! And I'm not missing it
You are still missing my point: I didn't like Google Search, I tried an alternative (DDG) which works perfectly fine for me, if that doesn't do for you maybe you might want to try other alternatives that I know exist but I don't have any need to try out myself because I'm perfectly happy with the alternative I already have.
> It seems like when you have very weak arguments you go ad hominem and make up motivations.
I think you're still misunderstanding here. I'm not putting any judgment neither in my article nor in my comments to you. I don't have the pretention to target all readers on the planet, it's expected that some are not targeted by my article(s), if you are happy with one specific solution you're most probably not whining about it being enshittified in the first place, hence my article isn't targeting you. I don't understand how nor why you interpret that as avoiding a critique, it's just stating the facts from my point of view.
I flip your last comment then: it seems to me that you're focussing on a very specific point made in the article (some alternatives for Search I didn't try myself) while glossing over the 99.9% of it. If your argument is "your examples suck" I accept it, I thank you for bringing in your experience in this discussion, and I'll try to do better next time... or maybe not, I'm still imperfect and lazy most of the time so shouldn't make any such promise!
> why you find them worse than Google.
DDG -> Bing -> Microsoft.
Ecosia -> Cloudfare
Graphene OS -> Reskinned Android
The problem is scale. Trying to replace something big like Reddit/Browser/some-huge-library requires enormous resource investment which is inviting the same forces that enshittified the original. The original reddit was a link list with voting, no comments/media/etc it was cheap, and as it grown into social media giant with insane complexity, it became much more expensive and slower to process(both on client and server). But the users loved it, they now don't need to host the video/image/comments elsewhere, its all included inside the walled garden, and reddit which was 100% links to outside resources is now mostly self-contained media with pictures, videos, blog posts(self.subreddit) being most of content and hyperlinks to "outside" being mostly mainstream "big websites" with social clout.
I agree that scale is one of the factors involved, and businesses tend to go down the Reddit way. That said I don't think it can be generalized to all the businesses out there, and a few of the examples I do, first of all Proton, seems to show to me that a differen kind of successful (albeit not über greedy and trillions-making) business model is possible.
It's probably more relevant for content, e.g. the massive amount of (good) content present in YouTube (and YT music) is the reason I'm willing to pay the premium price even if I have close to zero sympathy for Alphabet as a company. But for services like email, or products like a browser, I really don't care about scale at all, I just want it to work well and possibly don't spy on me to sell my data.
All good things to do, but I think a different Doctorow thing is worth citing here too:
"Shopping isn't politics" [0], which I would summarize as "Consumption choices are vastly inferior to actual politics, never pursue the first at the expense of the second."
[0] https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-05-21...
Thanks for the link, I'll read it later on my Kindle with calm, seems interesting.
That said, I already tend to disagree with the title, for e.g. buying an electrical vehicle or a photovoltaic system for your home IS political, it sends a message that you're choosing a particular kind of technology which is arguably more sustainable, etc.
Consumption choices matter, shopping is politics, don't stop complaining.