Time to get out of Google Podcasts for anyone that is still using the service

I have a Gmail account that catches/forwards stuff now and again that I signed up for over a decade ago, before I used a password manager and kept track of everything, and YouTube. A Google store line of credit, too, for pixels. Everything else I’ve migrated to my own website, or my own ‘cloud’.

There was a big issue with Google Store/Fi Store a few years ago where devices were being ‘lost’ in transit, and it ended up being FedEx employees stealing them and resealing the packages. But Google’s handling of the situation was absolutely shit, and two years of reading horror stories usually around bf or the holidays, drove me to migrate my account, one service at a time, to somewhere I could actually control and trust - as it is well-known that if you do a chargeback on G, they axe your gPay access, which means you can’t buy or pay for anything: drive/photo storage, gOne, devices, apps/music/movies/games/books, app subscriptions, pay your bill on Fi or gDomains… and if it happened to me, I would not sit quietly with no device for weeks or months while G put the blame and suspicion on me. Fuck all that. Chargeback baby, it’s not gonna be my problem anymoreeeee~

Took me from an outspoken G fanboy to ‘run the fuck away’ within 24 months, and all it took was stories of other’s being treated like shit and being on the hook for hundreds or a thousand+ dollar devices, over and over, while support did fuck-all and the actual people ‘investigating’ were not accessible by any means.

This is ofc on top of G axing shit because they feel like it. Run your own mini server, own your data, don’t be at the non-existant mercy of a massive soulless corporation.