This post is somewhat inspired by a recent post in this same community called “Is anyone else having trouble giving up Reddit due to content?”
I imagine “Reddit” will be a common answer. (And it’s one of my answers.)
Another of my answers is “Hasbro.” First Wizards of the Coast (a Hasbro subsidiary) tried to revoke an irrevokable license and screw over basically all 3rd-party publishers of D&D content, then they sent literal mercinaries to threaten one of their customers over an order mixup that wasn’t even the customer’s fault. D&D: Honor Among Thieves and the latest Transformers look really good, but those are within the scope of my boycott, so I won’t be seeing those any time soon.
Third, Microsoft. (Apple too, but then I’ve never bought any Apple devices in my life, so it hardly qualifies as a boycott.) Just because of their penchant for using devices I own against me in every way they can imagine. And for really predatory business practices.
One boycott that I’ve ended was a boycott of Nintendo. I was pissed that they started marketing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (though it didn’t have a name at the time) before the WiiU came out, prompting me to be an early adopter of the WiiU, and then when they actually released BotW, they dual-released it on WiiU and Switch. I slightly eased my boycott when the unpatchable Fusee Gilee vulnerability for the first batch of Switches was discovered. I wanted to get one of the ones I could hack and run homebrew on before they came out with a model that lacked the vulnerability.
Cars - Even if it makes my life extremely difficult in today’s day and age, I’ve decided to try my best not getting/buying a car. I’m in Europe, so this is much easier to do than in US, and I want to see how far can I go with a bike or public transport only.
Blizzard, Bungie, Activision, Bethesda (at least titles developed by them) - anti consumer practices, even though some of the games are definitely good. As for Bethesda, I still would be down to buy games published but not developed by them, though the only one I’ve ever gotten was Dishonored.
Google and Microsoft - terrible privacy, tries to monopolize things. Actual evil companies and I don’t really like them, switched them out completely from my daily desktop life and I couldn’t be happier.
I’ve avoided Microsoft for years, but recently I’ve been reducing my Google use. I’m still on Gmail, and Street View is special, but I’ve been slowly replacing Google utilization:
Upcoming projects include replacing my phone’s Google-built Android image and transitioning to ProtonMail.
It’s not one big project, it’s lots of projects. It’s worthwhile, though. Along the way, I’ve reconnected with my love of good tech and I’ve gained new hobbies like privacy and contributing to OSM.
Honest questions if you don’t mind. How do you avoid Google? I understand the want/need to avoid them, but not knowing any better (like most people i imagine) opted in for everything because it’s just so convenient and their apps work so well. So how do you get out without completely disrupting your whole life. Gmail, calendar, maps, keep, sheets, docs… I understand there’s alternate open source versions of them all, but none of them really seem to work as well, and do the apps really not track you? How do you get out of Gmail? So you now have to abandon it or can you forward to thunderbird or something ?
I slowly degoogled my life. It took me a lot of babysteps and a couple of years but it was well worth it and sound pretty impressive now: My phone runs Lineage OS with MikroG, I use OsmAnd for maps, NeoStore for open source apps and Aurora Store for like three apps I really want from the Play Store. I pay 1€ per month for my email-provider and get calendars, tasks and contacts, which I sync with DavX5 to my phone and computer. I run Linux on my Desktop PC since a couple of months and love it so far. My router runs through a Raspberry Pi with Pi-hole, which catches a lot of telemetry and ads.
You’re right, sometimes it’s a little less polished or convenient, but that’s okay because I never forced myself. That’s how I got this far I think.
I got put of gmail via protonail and proton mail provides me a lot of things that google offered. Proton offers zero access encryption.
And for the open source alternatives if they were tracking thosevthat review the source code would callitt out.
For sheets and docs I don’t do a lot of collab work so I just use libre office but their are open source alternatives you can host for colabrotive work