I've really pared down my Google usage with the end of grandfathered GAFYD accounts as the last straw, so down to Sheets, YouTube, and Android as my last google usage. YouTube has no alternative, Android has too much sunk cost, Sheets I'm probably going to go back to Syncthing + Libreoffice I guess. Office 365 is the equivalent alternative, but not sure I feel much better about MS's consumer products than I do about Google.

Just use Invidious links instead of going directly to YouTube (for example, yewtu.be for the same remainder of the URL) for viewing. If you're talking about hosting videos, use Vimeo. Even when people post youTube links I use the Invidious alternative to stop feeding Google data. Also invidious has embedded download capability on their various sites.

What’s the sunk cost with Android? Apps? It’s very easy to switch to iPhone, I did it a year ago.

Apps and well the alternative to Android for me would be Plasma Mobile or something anyway. Many apps I use (Syncthing, Firefox, file manager, emulators) are forbidden or crippled by Apple policy.

While I have a work iPhone 12 so I use both iOS and Android daily, I do actually prefer the Android ecosystem, plus iOS being locked down in terms of installing third party apps is a disqualifier for my personal device. Also bugbears like the headphone jack, though I might be out of luck there in Android in another device rotation.

Microsoft has a very usable online version that's free (with a bit of upsell here and there). Arguably more capable than Google Docs.

Out of the frying pan and into the fire. Of course, I'm being a little flippant, but the MS ecosystem is not without its problems. A colleague has 3 MS accounts for dealing with 3 different things (a government contract, a 3rd party company contract, our company account). Because of this, he was in hell for days because of some fubar on the MS side. I have (seemingly!) different MS accounts, for Azure development and Office 365 and I am regularly confused by the various MS websites.

MS Azure accounts always seemed odd and overly convoluted to me. I had an issue with my personal Microsoft account where I couldn’t sign up for an Azure trial (wanted to kick the tires on Codespaces before it moved to GitHub). Turned out, my account got associated to my kids’ schools MS account because that email address was on a school mailing list. That was a pain (and many hours) to get figured out.

my friends that have one MS/Outlook account at their jobs, which have enterprise support reps for their big enterprise accounts sometimes have multi-day lockout for unknown reason, 2FA failure for days, absurd issues with timezones being inconsistent across MS services, etc.

Wait until you're locked out of your Outlook.com account. No way back.

For Google docs I switched to using a Synology server. Very nearly as good (better, in some ways) and I don’t have to worry about what Google is up to.

The up-front cost and setup time is a stiff investment, but I’m much easier in mind now.

The other side of the coin is my wife’s gmail, which is going to be deleted come May. So... we gotta figure that out.

What sort of collaborative editing does Synology allow? Is there a Nextcloud / Owncloud alternative to Docs / Sheets for collaborative editing?

> Is there a Nextcloud / Owncloud alternative to Docs / Sheets for collaborative editing?

Yes, NextCloud and Owncloud both integrate with OnlyOffice Community Edition[0][1] which supports collaborative editing of text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

[0] https://www.onlyoffice.com/office-for-nextcloud.aspx

[1] https://www.onlyoffice.com/office-for-owncloud.aspx

Same as Google, afaict. It has a slightly better permissions model, imo (I can create a doc with a password and share the link freely, or I can give specific permissions per user, like Google). Same editing/commenting/viewing interface.

My collab needs are pretty light, I only work with a few family and friends, but I haven’t run into anything I wanted to do in Synology that I couldn’t.

DropBox has a hook into Office's editors.