Exiting the Billionaire Castle

In 2025 I have spend some time to untangle my digital life from billionaire/fascist (that Venn diagram is becoming more of a circle each and every day) run platforms. So at the beginning of 2026 maybe it makes sense to talk a bit about what I did, why I went certain ways and what works and what doesn’t. There are a few caveats. I am a trained computer scientist, I financed a lot of my university years by running people’s server infrastructure and I have been running some of my own for more than 2 decades now. My personal computers all run Linux so I am not bound to any proprietary platform like Microsoftslop’s or Apple’s I also am employed and have some disposable income which allows me to acquire hardware etc. So take that into consideration when evaluating my steps. Also: This is not a howto. I think that infrastructures are deeply personal because our needs and wants are personal. The way we have pushed for a harmonization of everyone’s digital life through centralized platforms for the last decades has been a deeply inhumane endeavor. So what works for me might not at all work for you. Some things might though. My Infrastructure pre Migration I used a lot of Google’s services: Gmail for Email (with my own domain though), Google Photos for photo archival and sharing, Google Drive for Storage (since I already paid for extra Google Storage to keep my photos around) and Google Docs for writing, presentations etc. I had a free tier of Dropbox around for some secondary backup of encrypted data. Since I paid for Youtube to get rid of Ads I used Youtube Music for music streaming. I used Notion for notetaking/workflows etc. For instant messaging I kept around accounts on basically all relevant services (WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, FB Messenger, etc.) to be reachable by my contacts who all have their preferences. I had already been running my own XMPP and Matrix servers though that got mostly homeopathic action though. I was already hosting this website (and a few other things) on a root server I was renting at a German provider. Some code I published lived on GitHub. I had already stopped using my Twitter account after Elon Musk took over and moved most of my social media use to Mastodon and a bit of Bluesky. My Migrations I’ll try splitting this block up a bit into coherent segments for easier reading/skimming. Domain I had already used my own domain for a long time (multiple actually). If you have any form of online presence and it’s fully dependent on the goodwill of rich people maybe get your own name on the internet, even if just to redirect it for now. I cannot stress how relevant that is. Your “$name.substack.com” is not yours. I personally buy my domains at INWX, a registrar in Berlin (which coincidentally has their offices right opposite to my day job’s office, I used them before our offices moved there though). INWX basically only offers domains so it’s a bit of an expert thing, you can also get a domain when renting Webspace somewhere for example, might be less hassle. I evaluated many different providers and self-hosting. Let’s start there: Self-hosting. Self-hosting email is a pain in the ass. I do it for a legacy client and it’s a fucking clusterfuck (maybe due to his business domain but that’s not for here ;)). I do not need another job of cleaning up the mess when the big providers like Google or Microsoft start fucking around with smaller servers. The problem with email is that it kinda fails silently if you are not putting a lot of attention/work into it while it also being the anchor for almost anything (think account recovery, getting emails from your provider that your server will be shut down, etc). So self-hosting was more of a pain and a source of stress than I was willing to take on – my life is stressful enough. When it came to evaluating different email providers I had the choice between the super privacy/encryption focused services like Proton or Tuta or more traditional offerings like Mailbox, Posteo or Fastmail. I like encryption as much as the next person but I shied away from Proton and Tuta because they require an extra, non-standard software to communicate with the server which is a bit too flimsy for my tastes. I’m an old man I like IMAP over transport encryption thankyouverymuch. Both Mailbox and Posteo have the advantage of being run by German companies on German servers (under EU legislation) which is neat. Both are good choices. I went with Fastmail though. They are an Australian company but are very focused on providing just what I need (good, standards based email, calendar and contact management) for a very fair price. Mailbox was a close second but I have a lot of email that I keep dragging around and Mailbox’s plans don’t have the storage I need. Fastmail also makes keeping some Google services around very easy: It continuously imports emails that hit your Gmail inbox (even with me switching my domain over to Fastmail some accounts are bound to my Google account and therefore hit the Gmail inbox) and it allows to use Google calendars seamlessly in their interface which I need since I have a shared calendar with my partner there. The service itself works flawlessly and even has some cool features (their masked email implementation is great) and I could bring a whole bunch of domains in without any issue. My only issue is that Fastmail is an Australian company that hosts their servers in data centers in the US. That’s not great given the state of the world and might force me to switch at some point. But currently I am very happy with it. Migration was simple and the service mostly works better than Gmail. Cloud Storage I had done some tests with different solutions allowing one to set up their own cloud, some of them being rougher than others. So after that it was kinda obvious to me to go for Nextcloud due to it being open source, it being mature software and it having a big community of contributors. I evaluated renting a Nextcloud instance somewhere (there are many companies offering) but with me already paying for a root server (for this website for example) it made sense to just host it myself. This also mitigates the whole “someone else might be reading my files” kind of thread mode. I went for the Nextcloud AIO docker route for hosting: Most relevant parameters are set in a convenient way and I don’t have to worry about incompatibilities between different parts of the software stack. Setup is really easy but if you want to host your own file storage make sure you have some offsite backup set up (which I already had for my server). No a RAID is not a backup. For mere file storage and sync it works great. There’s clients for every operating system that just syncs your whole storage (or selected paths) down to your machine and let’s you work on stuff. Synchronization issues can appear when two machine open the same document locally but that’s not Nextcloud’s fault. Cleaning up those cases is not hard though. Nextcloud also offers access via WebDAV which allows my ebook reader to load books from my digital library without having to sync it in full so that was a huge added benefit. Nextcloud also offers calendar and contact management but I already use the Fastmail provided solutions for that. I will set up a sync from Fastmail to my Nextcloud in the next weeks though for backup purposes. Cloud Documents I was a heavy Google docs user. At work I have to use MS 365 but the collaboration features work spotty at best. But both were no options so I looked into what was available on Nextcloud (since I was already hosting that). There’s basically Collabora (based on Libreoffice) and OnlyOffice. Onlyoffice might look a bit cleaner but it’s a project/company that actively hides its Russian origins and given the actions of Russia lately I am not comfortable integrating that kind of thing into my workflow. I had already used Libreoffice on my Linux machine for light editing so I went for Collabora which Nextcloud integrates seamlessly. It’s not Google Docs. Synchronization sometimes feels a bit fragile, the interface isn’t as clean (it’s gotten a lot better though lately). Google Docs really was my sweet spot between features and simplicity (probably because I used it for so long). So switching added some friction. Less so with the document editor for writing but with the spreadsheet and presentation applications: The presentation software works very differently from Google Sheets and changing themes is a lot clunkier. There are more features but the Interface is very much an acquired taste. The spreadsheet application works but Google Sheets was a lot easier to program (that might be me being used to it though). After a few months I have now kinda gotten used to the Collabora stack. It works, it imports all your word files and whatnot. I sometimes wished I could have the simplicity of the Google Docs suite back. But I have used it with external collaborators (think editors for articles etc) and didn’t have any issues or receive any complaints. Just be aware that it’s less clean than Google Docs. And I probably would not edit a very long document with a large amount of people there. I did not evaluate purely text-based platforms like Cryptpad et al because I need a presentation and spreadsheet solution and didn’t want to hack that somehow into markdown editors. As I said: I am an old man with limited free time. Photos Looking for a Google Photos replacement is very easy these days: Immich just does the job. It’s basically a self-hosted full clone of Google Photos including shared albums, location tagging and face recognition. So you get all the features of Google Photos without training Google’s AI. Cool. But Photos take up a lot of space so hosting it yourself can become quite expensive depending on what infrastructure you have access to. The machine learning features need a bit of a capable processor and it has modest RAM requirements so pricing for hosting often starts out at 10 bucks a month depending on the storage you need. Hosting your photos yourself has its advantages but paying Google or Apple will probably be cheaper. In order to fully migrate my Google Photos I got myself a Google Photos Takeout which ended up being a bit over 150GB split over a few archives. I uploaded those to my server and fed them to immich-go which can automatically import not just the images but also the meta information (such as albums etc.). Immich has a great mobile app for Android so my photos automatically get backed up without me even thinking about it. It’s basically a an almost perfect replacement. Some people like Ente which does even more encryption and whatnot but I didn’t need the extra complexity given I run all this on my own server. I am hosting Immich via their docker installation. Notes/Workflows I had a lot of sorta complex data bases and workflows set up on Notion for note-taking and keeping track of ToDos etc. But Notion is kind of a non-product. It keeps you building processes and structures that are never fully what you want so you can play productivity a lot. While Notion might not be owned by a classic billionaire from what I know it’s still a service that pushed their AI slopware a lot and is fully US-focused so change made sense. I looked at many more or less complex self-hosted Notion alternatives such as Affine or Capacities but those again keep you playing on the meta level instead of focusing in what you need: They push you into creating huge note graveyards that don’t work for me. So I went back to the drawing board and ended up not running another app but go with Nextcloud again: The Nextcloud Deck app gives me Kanban boards that suffice for my own ToDo management. I stripped down my own note taking and went for Nextcloud Collectives which is sort of a Wiki with templates for new pages that you can define yourself. When playing around I realized that I could throw away most of the Notion scaffolding and just use wiki pages (w