For a Google drive alternative I’ve heard of nextcloud but haven’t looked into it. For staying in touch with news articles, etc you could look into RSS readers and subscribe to RSS feeds from publications online. For a Google alternative, duckduckgo can handle your search needs. I opted to sail the high seas rather than subscribe to multiple streaming services, but I haven’t found a YouTube replacement

I know you mentioned you weren’t super tech savvy, but check out some of the stuff on the https://awesome-selfhosted.net/ list. Not everything there actually needs to be self hosted or set up in any complex way.

I totally agree with you and this is the opportunity to call on the tech savy who are here. There’s a lot of people like OP, like me, drenched in frustration, because we realize we are the product, but we don’t have the strength and the knowledge to emancipate ourself from this position of semilliterate. Yes, you could say: just study, but when one works the time, having some organized free time is the Neverland. I think it’d be something memorable, that will endure times if people of good fill could put together some sort of wikipedia that explains simply how to come back to be a user, or even better an explorer and not just a product.
I know there’s something like but I do not have the skills to install it. I do have a proton account, I use DDG, mozilla firefox and I tend to use f-droid for every app, before going to Google play to download what I need.
I began to pay for the Internet services or make donations (small ones) to organizations who are respectful toward the person and bring/offer interesting contents to the net (Intercept.
But what misses is the will to communicate and literate people like us that suffer the Internet without having to tools to take back our right to be just a curious person who want to wander through the world rather than into a mega mall center.

My advice would be to look into things one at a time while also avoiding taking the sledgehammer approach. Based on what you mentioned, some things you might want to look into:

Look into some encrypted cloud storage/backup options. Filein comes to mind but there’s plenty. I’d recommend against self hosting your own cloud in most cases (like nextcloud) in most cases it is both less secure and less private especially on a VPS - and if its on a home server it makes your backups less redundant.

Try doing more stuff in web browsers, web wrappers, or front ends. Unlike an app, there’s a lot less sneaky stuff a web browser can do, even if it’s the same platform. The Brave browser does cookie isolation and progressive web apps well, it might make a good second browser dedicated to progressive web apps. Apps like newpipe are great for YouTube and piped/invidious for yt or nitter for twitter are two good examples of front ends.

Installing apks is easier than you might think, and if you install FDroid it’s three clicks (download, allow installation, install) and worth checking out. Once it’s installed you can treat it like any other app store, and in combo with Aurora (on FDroid) you can get about any app without going through a Google account.

As for email, you can forward emails from a gmail account to a proton account. And as for content, consider trying to follow via RSS (you can follow just about anything with RSS one way or another).

For social media look into activity pub and nostr. Just about any alternative social media is going to have the crazies from one or both sides of politics kicked off of mainstream platforms, but federated and decentralized platforms allow you to pick and choose a lot more.

Last, as the phone goes, whenever possible try disabling background data and setting aside pre-installed apps you don’t want to use and going from there. A step up from that would be to uninstall/disable them (either in settings or adb bridge for those you can’t disable). Custom Roms would be the biggest leap, and the most technological. If you’re going to buy a phone with the intent of installing one, Graphene beats everything else hands down while still being one of the easiest to install.

Good luck

You can pay for dreamhost, namecheap or any other shared hosting plan that provides WebDAV. Some provide unlimited storage. I am not sure how realy unlimited it is.

Buy domain and host empty website. Turn on ssl using hosting tools. Dreamhost provides you with free certificate for that. Namecheap charges after 1st year.

Create directory on the website using hosting tools and turn on webdav on that directory. It can be password protected. Turn on password protection and disable public access using hosting tools.

That will give you a disk that can be mounted on Windows, Linux or mac without additional software. On iOS you will need an app like OwlFiles. You will have access to it From home or coffee shop. Anywhere. It will act as your remote storage and you can access it using Explorer or Finder. Most tools will read content of remote disk without any restrictions.

Create another directory and leave public access to have public sharing directory only you can change (keep passwords).

Create another directory or use one of your private subdirectory with application Joplin and you get free and open source notes and todo system. That system can encrypt all your notes with master password. I recommend it: https://joplinapp.org

The might be other apps…

If you need Logic as your DAW you’re locked into the Mac ecosystem in that regard.

Might want to check out f droid

Lots of good advice in here; thanks!

I’m not going sledgehammer; I’ve been gradually stepping away for a long time. There’s a few things I can’t give up yet but I keep them to a minimum while trying to persuade others in the social mediasphere to join me in circumventing the Big Tech DataWhores. I’m still paying for YT premium (sad); I have FB only to use Messenger with a couple of people. I already use DDG, Mastodon, Lemmy, MeWe, DropBox, Protonmail. I am not going so far as to self-host…I dont have the time or money for that.

Hopefully some more ideas show up here and are helpful to others who feel the same as I do. Thanks!