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De-Googling: My Progress

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331–340 of 348 posts

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#332

My De-Googling process: *Search(1) -> DuckDuckGo *Gmail(2) -> Fastmail *Android -> SailfishOS (https://sailfishos.org/) *Maps -> OpenStreetMaps *Youtube(3) -> Youtube-dl, "subscriptions" with rss-feeds *Drive -> Self-hosted Nextloud & Syncthing *Calendar -> At first Fastmail, but nowadays back to paper calendar *Chrome -> Brave & Firefox (1) When having problems finding I sometimes check Google Search with bangs. (2)…

My list is: DuckDuckGo, Protonmail (tutanota also an option but want to self-host eventually, rather than switch to another provider), LineageOS (want to get to Linux phone asap, preferably NixOS), OSM, Youtube-dl and container tabs in ff, git, org-mode, qutebrowser and firefox.

What app do you use for osm?

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a bit wary of services with recurrent costs that offer a lifetime pass. But I guess even if they fold in 5 years you're getting your money's worth anyway. Pcloud also makes you pay separately (and quite a lot) for having encryption turned on.

Have been considering encrypting locally (which pCloud already does, but at the cost) using File Guard extension on Chrome, and Cryptomator on Android. All encryption passwords to be stored in BitWarden.

If I went that route I'd go for Google One or Microsoft Onedrive. Much cheaper and nice apps.

For me the point of using something else is to trust it enough to not add my own encryption, which is a pain especially on mobile.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some phones, proper hardware support is iffy at best, and things constantly crash at worst. The stability of LineageOS seems to correlate roughly with how popular that phone is with LineageOS devs, so if you have a phone with only one maintainer, chances are that some things might not work super well. (It also depends on how committed to open source the manufacturer is, but these days, the answer is "not at all"…

Ah, my last 3 phones were all OnePlus and I think those are pretty popular ;)

Yes, and I believe OnePlus is one of the few manufacturers that is fairly welcoming to open source and third-party ROMs (which makes sense since their original phone was based on Cyanogenmod). My current phone, the Sony Xperia XA2, is similarly very stable, even with microG, because Sony provides open device configurations for most (all?) of their phones. But almost all of my past phones (mostly Motorola and HTC) have had various stability issues that didn't exist on the built-in ROMs. It's still worth it for me, but I would definitely not recommend it to anyone that isn't willing to roll the dice and potentially put up with some pain.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#337
post #59
post #8

I actually think the results on DuckDuckGo are better than on google for many topics especially technical: - there’s less ads (you can turn them off completely, but I’ve only seen one ad on the front page at most which is ok for me) - not as SEOed (still not great though) - the box on the side is often more useful, e.g. Wikipedia instead of shopping ads - on mobile Safari I use the bangs [0] which have a sort of Omni…

As much as I would like to agree, as a user who has DDG as the default search engine, this is not my experience... DDG consistently gives me useless results when I search for less popular languages results (searching Dart, or the search-friendly dartlang, gives me crap every time, while Google finds stuff easily... sure, Dart is by Google, that may be a factor, but if I remember correctly, results for Groovy and very…

Just searched for "dart", got the programming language as the second result + the right-side Wikipedia box.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#338
post #51
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you guys use an ad blocker? I barely see any ads since I started using uBlock. Occasionally I browse without an ad blocker and the experience is horrible and intimidating. Actually ads and propaganda were the reasons I quit TV around 10 years ago and I have never regretted it. So much time and mental energy is freed up to do constructive and fulfilling things (e.g. reading books, sports, socializing, musing etc…

Been avoiding internet ads and tracking for 15 years now. I feel like the unibomber. Facebook and google probably still have a good fingerprint on me, though, due to iOS not letting you use good ad blockers. Something uncanny happened recently in terms of the ads I do see that gave me quite a bit of paranoia. My SO recently bought a distinct pair of leggings. How am I seeing ads for that same exact pair of leggings,…

I use 1Blocker for iOS and macOS - I see far less “chatter” in the DNS logs than with uBlock Origin.

Of course I had to pay for it - which I am more than happy to do.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#339
post #327
post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really want/need to use a new horizontal tab paradigm that supports thousands of tabs. I just want a really good implementation of the standard top-of-the-window tab bar.

*Vertical I was lured in initially by the novelty. But it has become an amazing tool for organizing myself. When I browse HN, I shift-click on everything interesting, and it automatically gets organized into a nice collapsible tree. When I am working on a project, I move search results, project pages, and relevant info to a single tree. I leave other things open indefinitely, which effectively replaces bookmarks.

Wow - I love to browse the web like that, and that functionality sounds amazing. I’ll have to try it out - thanks!

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#340
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When DuckDuckGo doesn’t cut it, which IME is not often, then Google is always easily available with !g query

or Startpage with !sp. or Bing with !b. Amazon is !a, etc. etc. DDG has some neat functionality via bangs (aka !): https://duckduckgo.com/bang

I’ve been positively suprised many times, guessing for these bangs as well, very often they tend to be exactly as one would expect, even for sites in my own native language: norwegian, there are bangs for the more niche sites as well.

When I want to look something up in the norwegian Wikipedia I do !wno, for english just !w or !wen (and if I for some reason unbeknownst would want search in another language, it would be just a language tag away), I was very happy to see bangs for both the online norwegian dictionaries I use (!naob and !norsk), and some of the nicher sites, though, maybe not quite so niche here in HN: !dfw (Dwarf Fortress Wiki), even !nhw (nethack), etc.

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