Google is extremely hard to let. Facebook was way easier. Exported my data and deleted all accounts in 2 days.

Google has drive, YouTube, my old @gmail , plus recaptcha on every site.

Yea, my employer is on Google, it is impossible for me to transition out completely. Even though we would like to move out of Google, it is a herculean task since it is so deeply embedded into the organization. E.g., just having all your Google Docs with Google means there is no straightforward way to retain all the docs, along with all the links etc scattered around in emails, and be able to retain access permissions to the docs in any meaningful way. It is much easier to not get sucked in if you are starting a new company.

Interestingly, I found it extremely easy to delete my Google account. YouTube has RSS for subscriptions and youtube-dl/invidious exist. I never used Gmail. I never used drive.

Facebook on the other hand had my small group of friends that I talked to via messenger. I stopped using facebook but just couldn't get away from messenger until I finally made an ultimatum to my friends about switching to Signal. Now I have neither a facebook account nor a google account and surprise surprise my life isn't in shambles.

> Exported my data and deleted all accounts in 2 days

Did you ever look at the export? Did you use it for anything useful?

I mean, there is nothing to look at more than once. It was about 11GB in size. 6-7GB was photos, 1GB was drive.

I look at the old photos sometimes. The rest was just old mails, my location/steps walked/activity info, some YouTube videos I had liked and 2 comments. There was also some activity with Google Assistant

I just realised, you were maybe asking about Facebook.

It had just chat (in a neat HTML format), photos posted and friends list.

The rest was useless info - liked posts, ads clicked on and instagram username

That depends entirely on how deep you are. If you use Drive to store some personal files, then sure, you move your files to any alternative, install it as needed on your systems, and move on. If you frequently collaborate on Google Docs documents using hangouts and all of your contacts use your @gmail.com email address to communicate with you (whether by email or Hangouts), it gets really messy really fast. And then there are the services which, due to network effects or otherwise, don't have a real alternative yet; notice that this post talks about replacing YouTube with... alternative frontends to YouTube.

Agreed. This post seems like it's more about getting rid of proprietary software and replace it with free and open-source software,which admittedly is a lot harder.