Email to avoid email providers from companies like Google or Microsoft.
I’m still using the services of Big Email, which means I’m the product in this setting. From a philosophical standpoint, that sucks. From a practical point of view, I don’t really see any downsides. Surely there are some that I’m just not aware of.
If they want to show me some ads, I have ublock origin and NextDNS to take care of that. What else should I know about my situation?
They get access to all emails used for banking, shopping, social media accounts, etc. Depends on if you are fine with them being able to build a detailed profile off your emails.
Ads is like the least problematic aspect.
You have zero privacy and also generate power for them to do the things they do, which is gargle trump’s sharty grey scrote and thus empower trump
Your email is the root of your digital identity, and pretty much everything in your digital life is tied to it. If your email is provided by Big Email, they own your digital identity and it exists at their whim, with no recourse if it gets taken away, compromised, or abused.
If you own your domain and pay for mail hosting, you can at least move your email between providers if something goes wrong, and have some recourse with those providers since you’re a customer instead of a product.
Seedbox. I’ve had mine for over 10 years and I’m still paying the same $15/month, so it’s effectively gotten cheaper, and they’ve actually upgraded me at least twice in that time to give me more storage & bandwidth.
I know it’s an unpopular one around here, but definitely YouTube Premium
What do you even gain from it? Seems like a waste of money to me.
No ads on my devices that don’t have ad-block (iPad, Apple TV, etc), plus I share my sub with my parents so they don’t get ads.
Plus I like that my views contribute $ to the creator unlike using Adblock.
And also YouTube Music, altho I don’t use it much tbh but cool it’s included
Electricity has been a pretty good subscription. Zero sales or promos ever though.
It was an expensive service, so we started to self host. It’s been pretty good since then.
Mullvad, and a strong internet connection from the spyware company of your choice. With that you can pirate any media, and browse the internet. I have never needed more.
Kagi is a great search engine that I’ve found to be worth paying for.
Nebula is pretty cool, though I have the lifetime pass. Or patreon.
Trigger warning: I use a lot of big-tech services from Google for work and non-work purposes.
YouTube family subscription. It’s YouTube Music (equivalent to Spotify for how I use it), and ad-free YouTube (which I watch regularly for long-form science content) for 6 people at $20/month. The price hasn’t changed in several years.
Claude Code API account. I use it to keep my Obsidian notes organized, generate summaries, occasionally code, etc. I spend $15-30 / month on it, paid by my work.
Google1 subscription. 2TB of cloud storage for $20/month that I share with my son. Gemini Pro included (for now), which is useful for general queries and text processing, code analysis, etc. NotebookLM is better for some things, and is also included.
Work supplies a ChatGPT subscription that is good for some niche uses, but I could live without it. Once investor subsidies dry up, I’ll probably keep the Claude and Gemini API connections, since their prices probably won’t change.
Kagi.
Protonmail/VPN.
Namecheap (custom domains).
Nabu Casa (I could route subdomain myself but I love Home Assistant and want to support them).
PBS Passport.
Consumer Reports.
Nebula.
PDF-XChange Editor.
Tidal.
ServRica VPS (for Urbackup).I actually pay for quite a few digital service subscriptions. Off the top my head: Proton (email/VPN), Mega (storage), Kagi (search engine), Inoreader (feed aggregator), Signal (both voluntary donation and for online backup), Audible (audiobooks), Reuters (news), a few newspapers and magazines (online editions), some apps, …
Library membership
You pay to use the library or what??
Via taxes, yeah. But also, $0 is a real cheap subscription fee.
NextDNS.
This way, you can very easily filter out most of the ads on your mobile devices.If you want to, you can also play this game on hard mode, and start blocking telemetry more aggressively. It can be done, but various apps will stop working. When that happens, you’ll unlock a fun new mini game: DNS White List Tuning.
PBS Passport. Support your local PBS station
Kagi, next DNS, mullvad
If you’re using mullvad, why not also use their DNS? Just curious
Uhh Cuz I don’t know how! I really only know networking basics…need more time to learn.
Edit I figured it out. However I do like how on nextdns I can see all the logs and analytics of what’s being blocked. Will mullvad do that?
Health insurance, if you can afford it
Or, hear me out, tax that goes toward socialised healthcare.
We have to work in reality
It is reality in most developed countries…
