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What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?

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Re: What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?

#111

Post by prophesi »

suyash wrote: post #29

what's a good alternative to gmail?

For email clients, Thunderbird on desktop, FairEmail on Android. All open-source. It should be pretty straightforward for them to deduce what your Gmail SMTP settings are, and you'll be able to add your emails from other providers as well.

If you mean actual email providers, that'll be a bit harder to find. Most of the good ones don't have a free tier. FastMail is solid. ProtonMail has a free tier, but you have to pay to access the IMAP/SMTP bridge (which lets you use it with Thunderbird/FairEmail).

Re: What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?

#113

Post by anderspitman »

dnpp123 wrote: post #99
annadane wrote: post #36

It's not fair to the public that FB bought up Insta/Whatsapp. That is a true lack of choice. If it were just FB, fine, ignore it, don't use it, use Whatsapp. But no, they get to buy up competition whilst telling us how much our privacy and integrity is taken seriously

For messaging, I highly encourage people to use matrix.org. For tech savvy people it's really easy to self-host https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy and the good part is that you can set up bridges to telegram, whatsapp, facebook, irc, discord, slack... So you can use those apps privately while waiting for people to switch to better alternatives (which may never happens sadly). Bonus: the deskto…

I tried, I really did. Got my close group of ~8 friends on the public Matrix server. People would miss messages because they only use Matrix for that one thing, and would forget to login/check/etc. That and a few choice little bugs pushed them back to FB messenger. That said, I'm hopeful for the future of the protocol.

Re: What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?

#114

Post by neiman »

For IM there are too many alternatives to count.

For search there are a few, DDG is the best known imo, however, none of them is as good as Google's search engine, especially when it comes to Hebrew (my mother tongue).

As for Facebook itself, the problem is that it's offering now a combination of social media, photo storage, discussion groups and an IM platform - to name a few. It's not easy to make an alternative to something so complex.

Re: What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?

#115

Post by warp »

rapnie wrote: post #82
annadane wrote: post #36

It's not fair to the public that FB bought up Insta/Whatsapp. That is a true lack of choice. If it were just FB, fine, ignore it, don't use it, use Whatsapp. But no, they get to buy up competition whilst telling us how much our privacy and integrity is taken seriously

I would love to move to Signal and send anyone reaching out to me on Whatsapp an auto-reply with a Signal invite. Couldn't find how to achieve that. Anyone knowing if this is possible?

Facebook has an API for whatsapp, which I believe is a closed beta. In theory you could build an app to do this for you, twilio supports this and let's you use a development key even before you get into the beta.

[I expect that's too many hoops for your use case though ;]

Re: What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?

#116

Post by Jagat »

pjc50 wrote: post #107
lotsofpulp wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's not fair to the public that FB bought up Insta/Whatsapp. The public probably is not able or willing to pay for extremely valuable instant global communications service that handles audio, video, photo, text, and other data. Regardless of who owns it, I know that my network of people across 4 continents derives great value from the free service.

WhatsApp was monetized before it was bought, although I can't remember exactly how.

They used to charge $1 per year after the first year

Re: What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?

#117

Post by tubbs »

have_faith wrote: post #24

I'm actually building an alternative to Facebook for people fed up with Facebook and just want to stay in touch with people and not much more. I would go as far as calling it a glorified address book with some extra features for having up-to-date contact details for everyone that has granted you the privilege of having them and a very cut down version of the feed. Which brings me to the question of monetisation. I do…

I don't know how sustainable it would be, but I've always been fond of DuckDuckGo's ad model: https://help.duckduckgo.com/company/advertising-and-affiliat...

Additionally, an adless "pro" feature could be purchased for some small fee that would be comparable to what ads rake in for the average user.

This is something I've thought about for a while but I've never had the resources to throw it together. I wish you the best of luck!

Re: What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?

#118

Post by msftie »

have_faith wrote: post #24

I'm actually building an alternative to Facebook for people fed up with Facebook and just want to stay in touch with people and not much more. I would go as far as calling it a glorified address book with some extra features for having up-to-date contact details for everyone that has granted you the privilege of having them and a very cut down version of the feed. Which brings me to the question of monetisation. I do…

Is an(other) alternative to Facebook the solution? Can we evolve beyond this? It seems to me like we all have what you’re building in our pocket already.

Re: What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?

#119

Post by monsieurgaufre »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #2

DuckDuckGo is really changing my world. It’s like I’m seeing a whole other internet I was missing before with Google search results. I get much more relevant answers and less SEO targeted garbage that says all the right words usually while saying nothing at all. I was skeptical, but I encourage you to give it a try if you haven’t before.

DDG is bad as soon as you're not in the US of A and/or speak any language that is not english.

Re: What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?

#120

Post by bitL »

chx wrote: post #76
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #2

DuckDuckGo is really changing my world. It’s like I’m seeing a whole other internet I was missing before with Google search results. I get much more relevant answers and less SEO targeted garbage that says all the right words usually while saying nothing at all. I was skeptical, but I encourage you to give it a try if you haven’t before.

So I need a 1m long C7-C8 extension cord. Not a 30cm, not a 50cm, not a 1.8m, I need 1m long. Let's search: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=c7+c8+extension+cord+%221m%22&t=h_... let's force the titles: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=intitle%3Ac7+intitle%3Ac8+extensio... That's completely broken, the titles contain none of the three things asked for. yeah, I am not hopeful with duckduckgo either. I mean, Google is just as bad bu…

DDG's quality actually decreased in the past year as now they seem to ignore explicitly required stuff in a query quite often. It used to be you just used quotes and got what you wanted, but these days that might get ignored. "-" for excluding similar popular words also seems to have stopped working.
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