I'm more curious what the author uses for his self-hosted email. None of the IMAP servers I've seen so far are particularly stellar.
My divorce from Google - One year later
21–30 of 66 posts
Re: My divorce from Google - One year later
#22I'm more curious what the author uses for his self-hosted email. None of the IMAP servers I've seen so far are particularly stellar.
Have you tried Dovecot?
Re: My divorce from Google - One year later
#23What this person is trying to get away from requires not using the internet in any way.
Re: My divorce from Google - One year later
#24Reading his service-by-service comments paints a much less favorable picture of his Google "divorce":
Search: Push (possible win with DuckDuckGo booleans, possible loss with Craigslist search)
Mail: Push (mainly using own server, Yahoo vs Gmail not an issue).
Maps: Acceptable, but significant loss. ("Mapquest is ok. Yahoo! Maps are my go-to" and "Yahoo! Maps UI isn't very good, but the maps are quite usable").
Music and Videos: Loss. Spotify covers music, Vimeo and DuckDuckGo search covers some (most?) videos, but the overall process described is pretty painful. Many alternative video sites are likely tracking him as well (despite attempted countermeasures).
Images: Push. Happy using private Flickr and Shutterfly, no noted advantages.
Social Networking: Push. Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter (occasional) cover most things. No indication of whether or not he reasonably matched his 3000 Google+ relationships.
GPS: Not used.
Google Translation: Loss. "Babelfish is ok. Others do well, too. None are as good as I would like."
Apps: Not used / push.
So... depending on whether you break out Music and Videos and whether you count Apps, that's three clear losses out of 7-9 services, with no obvious win (other than the divorce itself). To me that doesn't look very good.
Re: My divorce from Google - One year later
#25My additional recommendations: Gmail -> business hushmail Google Maps -> Bing Maps GPS -> Use an actual GPS device or one of the iOS/Android maps that download to your phone. GChat -> This one is tricky due to being subject to network effects. Without getting into hyper nerdy jabber or private IRC nonsense, I'd say just use OTR and be done with it if the point is privacy. Google+ -> meet people for lunch Docs -> Zoho…
I'd replace gmail and gchat with fastmail.fm (owned by Opera, although if Facebook ever buys Opera...). You can run XMPP through fastmail's servers, which lets you IM all of your gchat friends (for now at least). As has been pointed out elsewhere, GChat's OTR is not the OTR protocol, so I wouldn't count on it giving you any extra privacy.
And it should go without saying that you get your own domain name for the accounts so that you can switch providers easily.
Re: My divorce from Google - One year later
#26I got sick of seeing everything Google all the time, so for a change of scenery I went everything Microsoft. I even switched from Dropbox to SkyDrive because of it's tight integration with the new Microsoft Office web suite, OneNote and outlook.com.
Admittedly, I'm only changing one taskmaster for another, but overall the change has been good, like an upgrade.
Re: My divorce from Google - One year later
#27For moving away from Gmail, I'd be interested in solutions that help you data-mine ahead of time how many mailing lists/services/etc you have linked to your address. It might be easy to just "switch" one day away from Gmail, but it could easily be weeks and months of manually unsubscribing/notifying/etc providers of the new address to use.
Vacation autoresponder and automatic forwarding are godsends for that. Gmail also has the sense to not autorespond to mailing lists.
Re: My divorce from Google - One year later
#28So you've traded one big company for a bunch of other big companies? I trust google with my data more than I trust Facebook or LinkedIn or Microsoft. Google runs their own ad network (and it's generally an honest and upstanding ad network, unlike some others). All that data they collect on you is for their own internal consumption. If they ever sell their data, they are giving their competitive advantage to their com…
generally an honest and upstanding ad network
Unless you happen to be a small guy and fall on the wrong side of their political beliefs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5438797
Re: My divorce from Google - One year later
#29So you've traded one big company for a bunch of other big companies? I trust google with my data more than I trust Facebook or LinkedIn or Microsoft. Google runs their own ad network (and it's generally an honest and upstanding ad network, unlike some others). All that data they collect on you is for their own internal consumption. If they ever sell their data, they are giving their competitive advantage to their com…
generally an honest and upstanding ad network Unless you happen to be a small guy and fall on the wrong side of their political beliefs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5438797
That is neither dishonest nor down standing, that is them annoyingly not doing business with someone.
Re: My divorce from Google - One year later
#30I thought he switched to self hosted, open source alternatives. What a silly article.