Talk
Bread&Net
Degoogling: building a user-respecting ecosystem
A talk at Bread&Net on what it actually takes to step away from the dominant platforms, and what you get — and give up — when you build the replacement out of open source.
01. Abstract
Abstract
"Degoogling" is usually presented as a checklist: swap this service for that one, and you are done. In practice it is a design problem. The replacements are rarely drop-in, the defaults are rarely as considered, and the cost of switching lands on the person doing it rather than on the platform being left.
The talk walks through what that looks like honestly — where the open-source alternatives genuinely win, where they ask more of you than they should, and what has to improve before leaving is a realistic option for people who are not already technical.
The argument underneath it is the one I keep returning to: user-respecting software is not a niche preference. A system that is hard to leave, or hard to use without surveillance, is a system that has made a decision on your behalf.