I often envy the people who simply seem to not care or notice.
I've been trying to clean up my account sprawl for years. Every so often when I have some time off I'll try to tackle it. I think I've deleted over 100 accounts, but I still have over 300. It's a lot of work on some of these sites. I spent 45 minutes on hold with Sony just for them to tell me no and hang up on me before I could reply.
I've also tried moving off Gmail several times, but this usually just ends in more account sprawl... I now have 3 inboxes to manage. Rome wasn't built in a day, but 1500 years later the ruins remain. That's how migrating email feels to me. I don't think I can ever actually delete an email account I used for over 20 years. If I switch to another provider (or one I've already half moved to) what will they look like in another 20 years. With email being our identity online, it isn't so trivial, unless you've only ever signed up for 5 websites and a handful of people have your address. For some reason I have an issue with the idea of setting up a forwarder to push everything to one place. Pushing spam around just feels like it makes a bigger mess.
I acknowledge is hard, but everything worth in life seems to be, so fighting against what they try to shove down our throats seems to be the only meaningful way.
If I may give you a suggestion for how to get rid of GMail:
1. register your domain 2. either have the registrar redirect your emails to e.g. your Pronton address, or pay Pronto the 3$/month premium to host your domain emails directly. Nice benefit: you now have unlimited aliases for your @domain.tld domain 3. setup a redirect for all the other GMail / etc mailboxes to your new Proton account
In this way you won't lose any email and will start to advertise your own email address, which is also allegedly giving a more professional feeling that <something.something>@gmail.com for who's receiving it.
> Google is arguably THE ads business ... find way better than Google Search.... I’ve been using DuckDuckGo as default search engine since…
DDG relies a lot on Bing, from MS, and how does Bing earn money? "We run ads, senator" And it's not "way better", cite at least a few search examples where you think it is
> few other alternatives which I haven’t tried, like Brave or Ecosia.
So even worse? At least try them before recommending!
Since long I just don't see any reason to try out another search, I just get the results I want in a single shot. Another thing I like with DDG is that it doesn't seem to return different results depending on the profile it has on you, like Google does, so the same search tend to be deterministic, and that's a value added for me, might not be what you want though.
> So even worse? At least try them before recommending!
Fair, instead of complaining about my ineptitude though you could enrich this conversation saying why you find them worse than Google. I still stand by it though: Google Search is the biggest evil by far so whatever is not that is worth a try in my opinion, can't hurt for sure.
> why you find them worse than Google
Because their index is smaller, so results you get in Google aren't found there. And there is no benefit in better filtering of seo/ai slop garbage. So the core function is worse. Though I've not seriously used Ecosia, only DDG/Brave And sorry, I don't remember the various examples I've compared them on, with Brave it was usually "found nothing useful, tried a few terms, still no, switch to Google, move on", so only remember that experience as being frequent enough
> worth a try in my opinion
Yet you haven't tried, so obviously it's not worth it in your opinion
It's probably more relevant for content, e.g. the massive amount of (good) content present in YouTube (and YT music) is the reason I'm willing to pay the premium price even if I have close to zero sympathy for Alphabet as a company. But for services like email, or products like a browser, I really don't care about scale at all, I just want it to work well and possibly don't spy on me to sell my data.
"Shopping isn't politics" [0], which I would summarize as "Consumption choices are vastly inferior to actual politics, never pursue the first at the expense of the second."
[0] https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-05-21...
That said, I already tend to disagree with the title, for e.g. buying an electrical vehicle or a photovoltaic system for your home IS political, it sends a message that you're choosing a particular kind of technology which is arguably more sustainable, etc.