It did not start with a principle. It started with adverts in the start menu of an operating system I had paid for (to be fair: a long time ago), and with the slow recognition that everything I used from the big two was getting worse in the same specific way — more suggestions I had not asked for, more things moved around for reasons that had nothing to do with me. More blinking, nagging bullshit in corners I don’t want it to be. And at Google, increasingly, the unmistakable feeling of being the product rather than the customer.
That is not a decision. That is an irritation. A slowly, ever growing irritation. The decision, such as it was, came in spring 2026 and looked like nothing much: I thought of replacing one service, then another, and at some point there was a list. In hindsight, it’s mind-boggling how complex, interwoven and sprawling 20+ years of living extensively digital can become.
The list currently reads twelve areas, eleven done, one open. Passwords, photos, notes, tasks, browser, search, calendar, contacts, files, documents, media — and email. Bitwarden for passwords and second factors, Immich for photos, Obsidian and BundledNotes for notes, Firefox and Kagi for the everyday, Infomaniak for calendar, cloud storage and mail, OnlyOffice for documents, addy.io for aliases. Some of those have been quietly doing their job for years — long enough to end up on a list of things that stuck — and the photo library runs on the machine in the basement. Four old accounts are deleted outright, two more retired and forwarding. None of that order was planned. The easy ones went first, which is how these things always go, and the hard one is still sitting there.
Four things I would tell anyone starting this, all of them learned the boring way.
Never switch anything off hard — run both in parallel and keep the forwarding alive until weeks have passed without you missing a thing. Export before deleting, and actually open the export rather than just downloading it. Move your second factor into a password manager before you change the email address on any account; I have not locked myself out this way, and I have no appetite for finding out what it feels like. And get your own domain, because without one every change of provider is also a change of address, which is exactly why most people never change provider.
Which leaves email. Fucking email. Every account I’ve fully deleted feels like a weight off my chest (looking at you, GMX-address from my teens). It’s suspiciously easy opening gmail-accounts, which is why I’ve opened several of them over the years. A more disciplined person would’ve stopped at account nr. 3, but I kept going. As long as my trusty Bitwarden kept remembering those logins, accounts can be made! Which left me in the mess I’m now: three still heavily used gmail-accounts, hundreds of logins pointing back to them. Migrating it to my new address has been an absolute chore. I loathe it. Somehow I’ve finally arrived at those three accounts being directly forwarded to my new main account, which is what I intend to keep doing for at least a year. Hopefully I’ll be diligently pointing accounts/logins to the new address and phasing the old accounts out more and more. I’ll see. For now, the temptation to open up yet another gmail account is simply not there. Too long have they lured me in with free stuff. I feel proud of having clawed back some semblance of sovereignty and independence. I’m sure Microsoft and Google will cry many tears about it.