Thanks to everyone who participated in the first 5-Week De-Google Challenge on Signal!
I’m about to start another de-Google challenge AND a de-Amazon challenge on Monday.
Here is info on the de-Amazon group. (Signal group and PDF plan)
The de-Google Signal group is here.
And for the de-Google challenge we’ll be using this checklist
I hope you’ll join (and share) one…or both!.
fyi, Signal’s servers are hosted on a mixture of Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.
Oh yeah, I don’t think we’ll be getting off AWS or Google Cloud anytime soon unless the big websites decide to look elsewhere for hosting…but we are doing everything we can!
lol
Does Firefox have some sort of addon that will let you easily check to see if the site you’re on is being hosted by AWS, Google Cloud, etc?
I don’t know, but that’s a great idea! I hope someone else here can answer.
Does your de-amazon challenge include de-aws? If so, that’s going to be tough. You would have to be extremely disciplined. If it’s just about not buying from Amazon, that’s definitely doable.
It’s just about doing what we can. I read an article by a tech journalist who experimented with de-AWS-ing, and it was pretty much impossible to use the internet. If you have any tips on how challenge participants can do that even to a small extent, that would be fabulous! But otherwise we’ll be disengaging from Amazon shops, Amazon-owned businesses, etc.
That’s an awesome step; I cut Amazon out of my life several years ago and haven’t looked back. And I sincerely applaud you for providing this challenge. As for getting rid of AWS, I haven’t found a way. I was actually hoping that’s what you were going to include. I found in my own attempts a few years ago that getting rid of AWS pretty much disables the Internet for you. I haven’t tried again recently, but I assume that it has only gotten worse. Same with Google and Microsoft clouds.
Thank you! I WISH I could help people de-AWS. Do you think it would be worth writing to the biggest companies that use it–or companies that may be more amenable, like Signal–and asking them to use alternatives like X, Y or Z? I could always float that idea in the group after the challenge starts.
If enough of us do it, absolutely
Maybe I can bring it up in the group during the challenge. Any idea what good hosting alternatives are, especially for huge businesses?
In the past I had been partial to Icelandic hosts because they’re not in the 14 eyes, but they’re still European so there’s that to consider. There’s also likely good hosts in Russia, China, etc. Other than those two countries, it would probably be a good idea to look for hosts based out of the global south, and they’d probably need servers in several countries to provide the traffic balancing large clouds offer. I haven’t looked recently, but I know Panama used to have a lot of hosts. That’s probably a good place to start.
You’re right, de-AWS will be difficult but maybe you can critique this Github* list.
*Github’s is owned by Microsoft.
Oh good, so glad you’re back!
Amazing. Just joined de google.
Thank you!
