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No More Google

nomoregoogle.com

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Re: No More Google

#191

Post by _iyig »

blunte wrote: post #66
jason0597 wrote: post #34

These anti-Google discussions come and go on the front page of Hacker News, but I'd be curious to know how many people actually degoogle their lives drastically after reading such discussions and articles. I believe it's more of a case of "Oh my god, Google is so disgusting! Shame on Google!", and then people open up a new tab in Chrome to search on Google about their next restaurant destination as if nothing happene…

I moved my many domains and many of my clients' domains and mail hosting to Zoho. I looked at Fastmail at the time, but there was one showstopper which I forget (and should revisit). That said, I have found Zoho to be very reliable and reasonably responsive to support issues. And their pricing is very reasonable, imo. For data, I use Tresorit. They have a great, if premium priced, alternative to gdrive, onedrive, etc…

>I looked at Fastmail at the time, but there was one showstopper which I forget (and should revisit).

Was it Australia's anti-encryption law?

https://www.itnews.com.au/news/fastmail-loses-customers-face...

Re: No More Google

#192

Post by kingosticks »

Normal_gaussian wrote: post #85
jason0597 wrote: post #34

These anti-Google discussions come and go on the front page of Hacker News, but I'd be curious to know how many people actually degoogle their lives drastically after reading such discussions and articles. I believe it's more of a case of "Oh my god, Google is so disgusting! Shame on Google!", and then people open up a new tab in Chrome to search on Google about their next restaurant destination as if nothing happene…

I've partially degoogled, and it was certainly influenced by these kinds of discussions. The most compelling reason I have found for degoogling is to make the question "what happens if they ban me?" get the anwser "nothing much". The next most compelling reason is to protect the world from their influence. i.e. take my influence amongst my family and peers and use it to steer another small part of the world away from…

Same. I'm at a similar position except I haven't quite got my Android situation sorted out. Google photos is really quite good. And maps too.

Migrating from Gmail to fastmail was really quick and easy and I wish I had done that sooner. Except I think I'll be finding websites registered with my old Gmail address for the rest of my days.

Re: No More Google

#193

Post by miguelr2201 »

These alternatives should definitely be taken with a huge grain of salt. I don't see how Discord is the third most "privacy-friendly" alternative to Hangouts that doesn't track you while explicitly claiming they "may" collect your email, messages, images, VOIP data, etc. [1]

[1] https://discord.com/privacy

Re: No More Google

#194

Post by pgt »

jason0597 wrote: post #34

These anti-Google discussions come and go on the front page of Hacker News, but I'd be curious to know how many people actually degoogle their lives drastically after reading such discussions and articles. I believe it's more of a case of "Oh my god, Google is so disgusting! Shame on Google!", and then people open up a new tab in Chrome to search on Google about their next restaurant destination as if nothing happene…

By shame and disgust, I suspect you mean something along the lines of virtue-signalling, but I think it's much more simple than that, it's plain old economics:

Long-term reliability and excellence. If you keep shutting down products, who could risk relying on them? Not me, because switching costs are non-trivial.

If you launch ten different chat products (luckily the icons match) and shut them down a few months later, what kind of product mind want to join your company? Not me, because I want to work on products that survive.

If your product hiring pipeline suffers because you keep killing products and you disable customer accounts willy-nilly, who wants to risk falling behind because they are stuck with products designed by designers who never talk to customers? Not me.

So avoiding Google at this point is less about morality and more about insuring yourself against a myopic product strategy and engineers who are not allowed to talk to their customers.

If you want to fix Google, put engineers on call and let them talk to customers. Fire anybody who refuses to talk to customers. The problem will resolve itself in 6-12 months.

Of course, it is important to put your money where your mouth is, so to answer your question directly: I am actively de-Googling myself and being very vocal about it because I believe that's the only way to affect change in large corporates who. Here is what I've done:

- Switched from Google to DuckDuckGo. Haven't used Google in over 6 months. - Switched from Chrome to Firefox. Very happy so far. - This week I signed up for Fastmail and switched my MX records over, so Google can't learn show me ads anymore. - Next up is Google Docs. Sheets is going to be tough.

Hey Google, you're screwing up BIG TIME. Talk to your customers!

Re: No More Google

#195

Post by SoSoRoCoCo »

rsync wrote: post #174
SoSoRoCoCo wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried and failed. I've been with Gmail since day one and I'm too deep to change every address. It'll never go away. I even use DDG but keep going back to Google & Bing when I'm dissatisfied. Google Drive is better than Duplicity and Carbonite, and way easier than OneDrive. Google Voice has no competition.

"Google Drive is better than Duplicity and Carbonite" This is an odd sentence because Carbonite is a provider and Duplicity is a backup software that you can point at many different providers. So Google Drive might indeed be superior to Carbonite but that has nothing to do with Duplicity. Further , there is almost universal consensus that borg is superior to duplicity. It has been called the "Holy Grail" of backups[1…

I put them all together because the end goal is to provide some kind of backup strategy. In that context, all three are equivalent. (Carbonite has clunky FileManager-like GUI for handling backups.) Make sense now?

I actually use Google Drive for files I share with people who don't have MS Office, then I use Duply+PGP->Duplicity to AWS S3 backups of all documents on my Mac that aren't on GitHub (and don't have GB of object or docker files), and lastly I do monthly TimeMachine for the entire DISK (because TimeMachine is effing amazing, I won't go into to much detail, but it is brilliant when moving to a new machine).

When it comes to backups, I am reluctant to spin up rclone/borg when a single alias that calls Duply+PGP to S3 on my 1GBit upstream fiber has worked fine for almost 10 years. Just telling me I should switch to something without a making an effort to explain WHY is basically asking me to spend hours studying and trying something that might fuck up my established protocol for what ROI? I don't quite share your enthusiasm for new flows, prima fascie. ;-)

Re: No More Google

#196

Post by pessimizer »

gerash wrote: post #86

The title says "Privacy friendly alternatives that don't track you": Then there are entries for Google authenticator -> Authy, Google weather -> DarkSky (whose Android app was killed), Google Scholar -> Arxiv, etc. I can't take these posts seriously no matter how loud their proponents have become

Take it as evidence of how difficult it is to avoid Google and continue to function on the web. I use weather.gov.

Re: No More Google

#197

Post by g42gregory »

I used to use Chrome browser for everything, but not anymore. Now I use Firefox, Safari and Brave. I am making preparations to move from Google Apps Mail and Gmail to Fastmail. I would not use Google drive and Google docs for anything. Still use google search, but looking for an alternative as I don’t trust results in many cases. I feel technically they are still better than other search engines, they just heavily manipulate search results.

Re: No More Google

#198

Post by pessimizer »

madhadron wrote: post #106

Offering arXiv as a substitute for Google Scholar isn't okay. The arXiv is one of the places indexed by Google Scholar. But Google Scholar also indexes most of the journals out there. A better replacement would be PubMed, but even that's pretty specialized.

The best substitute for Google Scholar is not accepting cookies from Google Scholar. It still works.

Re: No More Google

#199

Post by learnstats2 »

jason0597 wrote: post #34

These anti-Google discussions come and go on the front page of Hacker News, but I'd be curious to know how many people actually degoogle their lives drastically after reading such discussions and articles. I believe it's more of a case of "Oh my god, Google is so disgusting! Shame on Google!", and then people open up a new tab in Chrome to search on Google about their next restaurant destination as if nothing happene…

De-Googling has been an ongoing process for me, and sometimes takes a step backward. This type of discussion and article is a nudge for me to check whether I can make a better choice, rather than Google-by-default.

For example, I started using Google Docs again because I was required to for a job, and found some of its features useful enough that I didn't have an immediate replacement.

I reflexively use Google Translate (there are alternatives listed here that I didn't know about)

Re: No More Google

#200

Post by markussss »

I really want a good alternative to Google Photos. Jottacloud is getting pretty close, but there are problems when using it for photos and backups at the same time.
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