Gmail is an email service. Like the fediverse, email is federated.
By changing your email provider, do you really lose anything? You can still contact your friends, contacts and even various customer suports. You also can recieve emails from popular social media apps. If you degoogle from atleast one Google app, maybe Gmail could be the easiest and least life changing one.
While, Youtube could easilly be one of the most difficult to degoogle from. Not like literally but emotionally. Like deep down you know you can find mostly all you might need on something like Peertube but not all the entertainment media like on Youtube. You will also become a social outcast if peertube is the only app you use. You might not understand channels people mention in day to day talk from youtube or references.
If you use exclusively fediverse apps and sites, Chrome could be almost just as easy to replace as gmail, longterm. However If you use Youtube it won’t surprise me that Youtube downgrades your performance and user experience in what ever means neccesary on competing browsers.
Search is the easiest to replace. You can, like, replace it by googling superior alternatives like Brave, Kagi, DuckDuckGo, Searx etc
I frequently use DDG for an initial search. When it doesn’t give me good results, I frequently find better ones on Google.
Really? You roll over that fast?
Edit: why don’t you just cut out the middlemen and use Kagi or Brave?
Kinda but not quite, better hope them search resualts are comparable to Google’s, while if I just change sign up on a new email account, and just change my email on all my accounts then boom. Oh the interface might lack some (tbh) unneeded features. If emails send and you can respond then what are you missing exactly? Nothing too major.
Nah bro, all the good ones like Brave and Kagi and DDG don’t have stupid ads and they have many more niceties. Isn’t it true that G often ignores search operators?