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Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

degoogle.jmoore.dev

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Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#121

Post by ehsankia »

sosborn wrote: post #73
aitchnyu wrote: post #67

I never considered a Gmail alternative since Gmail has primary/social/promotion/updates tabs and proper threading of replies and almost perfect spam protection. What services do the above things as good?

I’m with you on the SPAM protection, but I find the tabs and threading to be god awful.

Tabs work flawlessly for me. It takes a little bit of time to get used to what goes where, and you can only use a subset of them, but in general, I love promotional emails being separate, so i can unsubscribe from them all in one place, that's my favorite.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#122

Post by nickelpro »

npsomaratna wrote: post #111
jaynetics wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there a history of Google de-activating accounts arbitrarily? Yes. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Aycombinator.com+%22google%2...

Example: https://support.google.com/adsense/thread/11487570?hl=en "I uploaded a YouTube video, which was a normal video in my eyes.. that got removed for inappropriate content and got my account disabled. Now my access to the gmail address is blocked" Being banned from Youtube because you violated their TOS is one thing. Losing access to Gmail at the same time, because everything is linked to the same Google account?…

That's a fair criticism, and perhaps a good reason to not use Gmail. But that's not an arbitrary deactivation, and it doesn't support totally avoiding Google in all things.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#123

Post by hx2a »

toastercat wrote: post #108
gonehome wrote: post #17

I 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…

I also moved all my e-mail off Gmail and onto Migadu using my own domains. This ensures that even if Migadu goes under, I could swifty move to another service and keep my same e-mail addresses (for the record, Migadu is awesome). Like you mentioned in another comment, it did take me some time to move all my accounts over (about 2 days worth), but I'm so happy I did.

How well does Migadu handle spam filtering? I recently switched from Google to AWS Workmail and get spam and junk I never saw before.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#124

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

XCSme wrote: post #68
submeta wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here: Migrated all my gmail accounts to Fastmail. Took me two days. Migrated Google Docs to Dropbox. And replaced Google Sheets and Doc with a Microsoft subscription (MS Word and MS Excel). Then there‘s the search engine. I tried hard to replace Google Search with DDG, but I have to admit that Google gives me better search results. Still I would love to leave this also behind. Finally there is youtube for me. Ai…

Is Microsoft Office really so much better than Google Docs in terms of privacy? Or is mostly just the "I hate Google, others are probably better" idea?

The mere fact that Microsoft actually has real customer support and implements features alone makes it better.

I was trying to rotate non-image / non-word-art text in a Google Docs table cell the other day and it’s literally impossible. I ended up having to create it as word art and position it as an image so it appears to be in the table but actually is on top of it

When I searched for Google support threads on how to rotate text in Docs, I only found forum posts by Google support agents stating that you can’t do it, which read to me approximately as “fuck you go away.”

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#126

Post by maps7 »

toastercat wrote: post #108
gonehome wrote: post #17

I 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…

I also moved all my e-mail off Gmail and onto Migadu using my own domains. This ensures that even if Migadu goes under, I could swifty move to another service and keep my same e-mail addresses (for the record, Migadu is awesome). Like you mentioned in another comment, it did take me some time to move all my accounts over (about 2 days worth), but I'm so happy I did.

Lots of text on Migadu's site but no pictures of what the inbox looks like

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#127

Post by prophesi »

ashtonkem wrote: post #79
submeta wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here: Migrated all my gmail accounts to Fastmail. Took me two days. Migrated Google Docs to Dropbox. And replaced Google Sheets and Doc with a Microsoft subscription (MS Word and MS Excel). Then there‘s the search engine. I tried hard to replace Google Search with DDG, but I have to admit that Google gives me better search results. Still I would love to leave this also behind. Finally there is youtube for me. Ai…

DDG works well enough for me on anything but programming. The moment I need to search for anything programming related, Google works much better for me.

I'd recommend StartPage; essentially a proxy for Google.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#128

Post by lrissman »

the_af wrote: post #89
submeta wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here: Migrated all my gmail accounts to Fastmail. Took me two days. Migrated Google Docs to Dropbox. And replaced Google Sheets and Doc with a Microsoft subscription (MS Word and MS Excel). Then there‘s the search engine. I tried hard to replace Google Search with DDG, but I have to admit that Google gives me better search results. Still I would love to leave this also behind. Finally there is youtube for me. Ai…

Out of curiosity, what's the benefit of replacing Google Docs with Dropbox? I seem to remember HN's readership is occasionally hostile to Dropbox. Myself, I use it but the same drive that would have me ditch Google would also make me ditch Dropbox... (I haven't reached that point, though)

For my use case, I choose to be mostly serverless -- I use Resilio Sync. It's not a perfect solution as they still host the tracker and if one device cannot find another then it routes via their servers, but otherwise all my documents are stored on my devices.

Another feature lacking is sharing with a non-resilio user is not possible with Resilio Sync.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#129

Post by strangescript »

nickelpro wrote: post #61

Genuinely, why should I care? What harm is likely to happen to my life by sticking with Google, a service provider I find convenient? EDIT: I don't want to be accused of fan-boying or astro-turfing. I just see "Avoid Big Company X because they collect your data" a lot and I just can't give a damn about companies collecting my data. Be my guest, if it means I get free stuff. My data is boring tech nerd data, use it to…

People have been raising flags about this for literally decades now and the other shoe has yet to drop in any kind of meaningful way. Everyone is tracking you online, but for some reason we only care about it when its companies that make good products that we like to use. Would you rather they not target you with ads and sell google searches for a nickel each? Meanwhile, I had an ad in my gmail yesterday for Google Fi, sign up today, its super easy! Except I already have google fi. Google's ad service literally couldn't check my gmail account against google fi accounts (apparently).

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#130

Post by rootsudo »

I enjoy while reading that page on extensions to use, it's a list of what can be normally accomplished by browser settings.

Are you expected to run 25 extensions? Many which do similar things and can be done by forcing the browser to delete cookies upon quit/exit/restart?

If the idea is a buffet, then what's the point? You're going to have a gap and DNS is going to be your weakpoint.

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