My biggest issue is there are some people I really want to follow who do youtube unfortunately. Other than that, I could see moving off the grid completely more or less.
I do toy with leaving Youtube though and just taking the hit, would be nice to not participate in ANYTHING the big tech companies produce.
I love F-Droid, a lot of useful apps and good gems for games on there. How do you like Lineage? I wanted to install it when I first got my last phone, but it was still unsupported on the galaxy S8 at that point. I stuck with the stock OS and put in NoRoot Firewall to block all of the system google and samsung apps from phoning home.
Lineage is fucking fabulous. The only issue I have is the camera quality is worse than stock, and knce in a while the alarms stop working until I restart it. Otherwise, it runs like a dream.
The only things I haven't removed entirely are gmail and youtube. I use protonmail now for 90% of my important stuff, but I still have a few various accounts that are more spammy pointing gmail because protonmail takes a decent amount of time to setup proper filters. For YT, I largely access it via 3rdParty apps or sites like NewPipe so I don't have to see ads or log in and can download videos easily. I like Bitchute as an alternative, but it still needs a lot more variety of content
https://phuks.co/s/Linux/34783 check out this program if you want to use youtube and still watch things. they do get your IP through googlevideo.com but that's about all. There are also frontends for youtube to browse channels and videos which do pretty much the same thing. Feel free to ask if you use those and run into problems. Open source stuff is fine mostly but configuring some of it can be a pain.
I never really got onto those places. I had a facebook for a small while due to peer pressure but quickly got really tired of how people I knew acted on there. That said I do go to the sites if i'm linked there sometimes because I don't mind giving them that information. Mostly I leech their videos with youtube-dl though rather than visit the site.
I was in Facebook for about three hours several years ago and hated it, haven't been back. Haven't watched any mainstream media in several years either. Still use Google to look up obscure things, though mostly that seems to end up with just going to Wikipedia. I watch stuff on YouTube occasionally, though I'm not "subscribed" to anything. I do not have a so-called smartphone; I have an old style flip phone that does not do texting. I do have a 3D printer which I'm hoping to upgrade to a 4D printer at some point and print out a hypercube and then just disappear into it entirely.
Not yet. I actually like using Google and Facebook services, even Google+. However, since Google+ is going away, and they also got rid of their url shortener, my news blog will take a hit and reposting stuff to G+ was a large part of my daily entertainment. I am competent enough to code my own site, I'm just lazy. Also, even though it was fun to use, Google+ was a mess and it's time for it to go.
On Facebook, I love to talk about my interests with others and practice using other languages (Japanese, Spanish, etc.) however, Facebook is notoriously run by douches and I do realize that I should leave it alone. I'm just having a hard time because the craft communities there are amazing.
The pretentiousness is this thread is thick and heavy.
Aside from YouTube, yes I have. But I don't have an account on YouTube, I use NewPipe when viewing on mobile and rarely use my PC these days.
My phone is running LineageOS without any Google apps installed. You can find a lot of decent replacements for google apps on F-Droid.