I switched to HEY earlier this year for email and so far so good! Google maps is probably the product I am most dependent on.
It's risky.. hey does not have custom domains
Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
191–200 of 665 posts
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#192I 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…
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…
Fastmail also wants a phone number. I no longer know what mail service to use apart from setting it all up myself.
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#193There are plenty of YouTube alternatives if you’re looking to just host a video somewhere; but if you’re looking to grow an audience or have eclectic tastes, then there is not a reasonable alternative to YouTube yet. You can have every single other video service’s app on your iPad or Apple TV or bookmarked in your browsers and all of them combined will not match the selection and breadth and discoverability of YouTube. They’ve had some controversies and even personally annoyed me a few times, but YouTube is still one of the web’s jewels.
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know it is easy to hate on big companies but how do you leave them when credible alternatives are not even close in productivity/performance. I tried leaving Macbook, but whenever I have tried the alternatives(even Thinkpad with Ubuntu), Macbook still seems to be at the sweet spot of life time ownership cost/performance. I do care about repairability, good keyboards etc. but I do have to look at things in balance.…
I have a MacBook and it’s great, I also have an iPhone. It’s the business model that matters to me more. It’s not a “hate on big companies” thing. In fact the big software companies usually have better security (google included) because they have some of the world’s best security people. I try to avoid companies that have an incentive to collect user information for ad targeting. Apple doesn’t have that (and they’ve…
Apple's privacy protecting actions only apply in countries where they can go through with it.
Here's one example where they can't protect your privacy. [1]
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insigh...
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#195I am currently running a degoogled Android phone. Hardest part has been mapping -- OsmAnd lacks many points of interest as well as Los Angeles street numbers. I am not looking forward to having to go by cross streets and looking up points of interest in a separate app (Acastus Photon).
Magic Earth (closed source freeware) uses maps from OpenStreetMap, but also has data for street numbers in certain regions including the US.
It's a convenient middle ground between Google Maps and OsmAnd until the FOSS apps improve.
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#196I 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?
They haven’t gotten much love on this site but I recently switched to hey.com after being a gmail user since beta in 2004 and couldn’t be happier. I like the “feed” for newsletter-y things (with a neat scroll to preview messages view) and the paper trail for transactions. There’s also something empowering about the simple “thumbs up” “thumbs down” screening queue for new senders.
I will say, however, that I never realized just how infrequently I receive mail that actually warrants my attention (let alone a reply) and that feels sort of lonely in a funny way.
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
I ditched both for similar reasons. I didn’t have a really strong need for either though and I do use iCloud to sync among my apple devices.
I also use iCloud for all my iDevices. It‘s not fast or as flexible as Dropbox but privacy wise I prefer them over any other cloud sync solution.
iCloud is the only one with servers in China, so it is objectively the worst privacy-wise.
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#198I am old so I have worked for various big and small tech companies, including most of the ones being discussed here.
Google is the one I would trust with my data.
They know how to do hosting at scale (unlike some really quite large and famous companies who suck at that), although not perfect, they have a humanist moral compass in their culture, and I don't expect them to go out of business.
I would not make myself reliant on a niche Google product (like Google Reader) as those tend to vanish, but a mainstream Google service like GMail or YouTube is a great reliable thing. If you think other companies are more moral than Google, you are fooling yourself.
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#199Genuinely, 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 F…
> 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.
Besides all the hypothetical horror scenarios I have one argument that at least for me is strong: I just don't want them to track me. In some cases (like posting this comment) I accept the tradeoff, but I want to be able to choose.
These sort of evasive techniques are about allowing people who want to make that choice for themselves to also have a choice of participating in modern life.
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#200I would love to see a similar list for de-Apple-ing. Apple's anticompetitive and monopolistic practices with the App Store, the terrible direction MacBooks have taken, its price gouging on hardware... the list goes on. Google is saintly by comparison.
There's no need for a list. To de-Apple, in the context of those 3 examples, is to not buy or use Apple hardware. That's it.
Apple is saintly by comparison.