2026-10-18 - less reliance on big tech

the past few weeks i've been trying to clean up my digital footprint. my ultimate goal is to be able to remove my github and google accounts with this exercise.

removing my google account means getting rid of the gmail i have used since either middle or high school for 15+ years of my life. so yep, this is a big task.

anyways, there are a lot of different companies and websites i have used over the years. i've been going through my password manager and deleting accounts i don't need or changing the email address for accounts i still need one by one.

some companies have an easy account deletion process that you can just do through the portal. while many others make the process much harder, filling out an online form or emailing their corporate privacy email address.

this is really a theraputic process and am excited for when i finally finish. it will make me feel like i have less distractions in my life and have more control over my time. and i don't think i'm the only person who finds this important.

i probably won't finish until early next year, because there is still a lot to do and some acount deletion requests say they will take months. which is ridiculous, but that's the digital landscape we are in now.

another reason for me doing this is that frontier llms seem to have impressive hacking capabilities, so i imagine some of the smaller companies i have registered with over the years could get hacked soon. the less digital footprint i have, the less likely i will get scammed.

another thing i have been doing recently is setting up recurring donations into things i believe in and removing subscriptions for things i don't.

as of today, i have setup recurring donations to:

the admin of the mastodon instance i am a part of
the zig programming language
the matrix protocol
the dsa political party

as well as others. i also am trying to setup subscriptions to smaller more focused companies. rather than using free services from bigtech:

switch from gmail to fastmail
switch from github to sourcehut
switch from duckduckgo to kagi

there is a lot more i can do, but it feels good to be going on this path. in my mind, this is a good thing to do. i want to have a clear concious and do the right thing. i want to support the things i believe in. and i hope other people will follow me.

i might post an update when i finish this and completely get off of github and google. however it would likely be mid next year because once i clear my accounts i will probably have a 6 month buffor before i delete my accounts for good.

so yeah, that's what i want to say. come stop by again later!