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And cloud SaaS are enemies of both! After all, in order to have data freedom, you need to have something to open in that other program, and cloud solutions do their best to not give you proper open/save file (and even if there's an export function, and even if everything is actually included in the export, it often isn't followed by import function that could read that export).

For this reason, I avoid using cloud SaaS for anything where can avoid it.



Absolutely. There are some exceptions though. Github is the obvious one. Dropbox by nature has your data constantly exported. Google for its sins has Google takeout.


Yes. And the first two I use, treating them mostly as dumb pieces of infrastructure. Arguably, the functionality they provide have a crucial ops component that I'm all for paying for someone else to handle it for me. But neither Github nor Dropbox locks me into anything.

Google - yes, web e-mail obviously is similar to the above; as for their office suite, I recently found a good excuse to justify shelling out for a proper Microsoft Office subscription (though I don't like that it's a subscription), and I stick to using the faster, locally-available, file-using, much more powerful (if still proprietary) software.




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