We're reaching the end of an era wherein billions of dollars of investor money was shovelled into tech startups to build large user-bases, and now those companies (now monoliths) are beginning to constrict their user-bases and squeeze for every single penny they can possibly extract. Fair or not.
Now more than ever, it's important for us to step back and reconsider whether we want to be billboards for these companies anymore.
For anyone unfamiliar, some good resources to have when starting your degoogling journey are below:
Privacy Guides - A list of privacy-respecting services you can use.
Plexus - A crowdsourced information bank of service compatibility with degoogled devices.
This random PDF - A study from 2018 detailing data that Google tracks about its' users.
After hearing about the three strikes YouTube thing, I just signed up for peertube. Already trying to get my photos back from google photos, but takeout destroys the metadata. GOOGLE PHOTOS IS NOT A BACKUP SOLUTION.
What peertube instance did you sign up for? I've always been interested but none have struck me as a place I would want to sign up at.
Tilvids.com. It’s a Linux-focused one. Odysee is also an option that has more content, but not part of the fediverse.