I like the irony of hosting this site on a Google-operated TLD.
Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
11–20 of 665 posts
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#12The list of alternatives just makes me lose hope of cutting out Google. They are lightyears ahead of the alternatives in so many categories.
Lightyears ahead, but are the alternatives good enough? I switched from using Gmail as the common landing spot for all of my email to Fastmail who in some ways is nowhere close to Gmail but in others are way ahead of Google. But above all else I know Fastmail isn’t running datamining programs on my email and contacts list to create and sell a marketing profile about me, and that is worth more to me than I’m paying them for email service.
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#13The list of alternatives just makes me lose hope of cutting out Google. They are lightyears ahead of the alternatives in so many categories.
I use DDG for search full time and I’ve found that I need to use !g less and less often. For the times I do use !g I am finding myself increasingly disappointed in the results. I think Google is losing the war against spamdexing [1] and I think the search industry is ripe for disruptive innovation.
I have seen and participated in a number of discussions here on HN about the potential for a new search engine that eliminates a lot of spam and commercial sites to allow users to find small sites made by real people, just like in the early days of the web. I hope it’s not just a nostalgic impulse. I’m going to investigate it myself after I graduate.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamdexing
Edit: forgot to add the link for [1]
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#14The list of alternatives just makes me lose hope of cutting out Google. They are lightyears ahead of the alternatives in so many categories.
Which?
[not op] Given that Microsoft/Apple/etc. aren't mentioned, G Suite has no real alternative other than Zoho (Note: nextcloud doesn't do email, so it's arguably not a GSuite competitor). This list would be better titled 'free/open-source alternatives to Google products' since excluding the other big companies extends past "de-google" and more into "open source living", if that's a good term for it.
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#15The hardest service to part with is Google Analytics. Sure, there are some awesome and open source alternatives but you’re either paying a lot for them or you have to set up/maintain servers/VMs/VPS for the app, the databases, backups, etc.
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#16I like the irony of hosting this site on a Google-operated TLD.
Especially one that Google weren't even going to let the rest of us use (an entire "generic" top-level domain to use as a globally-routable in-house domain...) and only capitulated after it seemed like the pressure on ICANN might cause them to Do Something About That.
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#17I dropped all google services and it wasn’t that hard.
The most tedious part is moving accounts from your gmail to your new email (I switched to using my own domain backed by fastmail).
Even with a password manager and a list of all my accounts this took me an entire day. You also learn how terrible most non-software company account management is.
On a lot of sites changing email is impossible. On some it lets you do it, but doesn’t actually delete the old one on the backend so you get emails to both (and it becomes impossible to turn off notifications on the old one).
One site couldn’t handle custom email domains, one site told me to create a new account and ignore the old one. One site changed my email, but still makes me login with my old email as the user, etc.
I ended up using an alias for the less trustworthy sites and filing as many CCPA requests as I could to the companies to delete accounts (naturally the sites bad about accounts are bad about this too).
The only google service that is really relevant and hard to replace is YouTube. I plan to delete my old google account and have a fresh one with everything turned off that I only use for YouTube.
Other than that though, it’s been a lot simpler than I thought it would be. Google is starting to feel like Yahoo to me, a company without clear vision or purpose.
They better hope their ad revenue doesn’t decay.
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#18Looking at this list, I would propose that it's easier to regulate and tax Google than it is to free ourselves of it via the private sector.
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#19The list of alternatives just makes me lose hope of cutting out Google. They are lightyears ahead of the alternatives in so many categories.
It isnt just Google you need to cut out of your life, all the global corps are complicit in building the surveillance state.
Copyright laws means you cant check your chips on your devices have not become persistent backdoors into your system. You simply can not check the code. Goal posts will always be moved as you are Resource Burned fighting the system. Welcome to the Matrix Mr Anderson.
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#20[deleted]