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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

#231

Post by y2bd »

itzael wrote: post #220
y2bd wrote: post #214

Any recommendations for email providers that support wildcard addresses (e.g. I can just give someone foobarbaz@y2bd.email without having manually set it up beforehand and it works)? I currently use ProtonMail which does support this, but PM is still lacking in terms of usability. I looked at some of the other well-known mail providers and was surprised to see that this wasn’t as supported as I’d expect (or, at least…

Fastmail supports regex and wildcards off the top of my head, as I have them set up with my own personal domain. My financial accounts for example are in the format of “bank+xxxxx@domain.tld”

Do you know if they’re required to use the +alias format? I’ve been burnt in the past by bad contact forms silently stripping out special characters out of email addresses.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#232

Post by throwaway5752 »

twicetwice wrote: post #229
throwaway5752 wrote: post #226

If only Google were my 10th biggest problem. Try to get Exxon, Shell, et al out of your life who aren't violating abstract principles but are literally killing the planet. Then let me get unethically farmed or raised foods out of my life (which, thanks to the US preoccupation with corn and the nitrogen it requires, are frequently overlapping with petroleum). Then let me get Oracle and Microsoft out of my life. Then l…

Why Microsoft over Facebook and Google? Recently I've been thinking that MS is the FAMGAN/whatever that I'd be most willing to work for, so I'm interested to hear your case.

Because I saw how they behaved in the 90s, see how much passive telemetry they collect with their share of the OS market, how much they push Windows logins with antipatterns, and because they own Github (when now controls npm).

edit: Let me say some nice things about them. I put them towards the end for a reason, and they probably don't belong with Oracle. I don't think they are a big problem in the world, if at all. They aren't the company they were in the 90s. Gates has become one of the worlds most staggeringly successful humanitarians because of his direct effort and indirectly from the giving pledge, and it has redeemed him many times over again. Nadella seems like a decent person and truly great executive, and they have improved enormously as a company under him. I would probably work for them. But I don't have any problem with Google, either. What Microsoft does have is a vastly greater potential for abuse.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#233

Post by nuker »

rootsudo wrote: post #130

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.

> Are you expected to run 25 extensions?

Yeah, that makes the article unusable. They should've split the list to 'must have' and 'others'.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#235

Post by pydry »

granzymes wrote: post #224
pydry wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you're not fucked either way. In fact, if you're white, middle class, etc. you're probably better off than most and will be given the most leeway. If your data on google/facebook/microsoft/amazon servers is kept to the bare minimum (& kept innocuous), if you self host and if you keep your data on smaller services your chances of getting caught up in a dragnet operation are minimized. Your chances of having an ele…

Or they go after the people who have tried to hide themselves ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I think this is a very odd thing to structure a life around, but then again I've never understood any kind of doomsday prepping.

I've never understood people who stock up on baked beans and hide in bunkers either.

You're right though. Maybe between the people who have facebook accounts they used to say bad stuff about dictator du jour and those who don't have facebook accounts at all they'll definitely go after the latter ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And, maybe there won't ever be a fascist dictatorship in the United States. After all, right wing populism is getting more and more unfashionable these days.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#236

Post by twicetwice »

aftbit wrote: post #227

Google Voice is the hardest service for me to replace. I don't see any alternatives on this list. I appreciate that they let me seamlessly send and receive calls and texts from my Android phone or my desktop. I have a hard requirement that my phone should be optional for all parts of my communication workflow.

Same. I could probably de-Google pretty quickly—my primary email is on my own domain now—were it not for Google Voice, which I rely on daily. And since I have to rely on it, might as well use the rest of Google's services, since they're so damn convenient.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#237

Post by twicetwice »

simplehuman wrote: post #191
maps7 wrote: post #125

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

Yet—as soon as they do, I'll probably jump to them. I'm using Zoho right now. That's the nice thing about having your email address at your own domain—I can move freely from provider to provider while using the same address!

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#238

Post by mianos »

gonehome wrote: post #69
actuator wrote: post #63

Earlier 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…

It seems to me gmail has not changed much in the last few years. Search is much the same but worse. The only change seems to be snippets that, for me, usually host some badly scraped content from another site with wrong answers but more effort on SEO. It seems a bit of a waste of 20% of the page. I wonder what those tens of thousands of people are mainly doing? Maybe working on stuff that we never see, like applying bandaids and string to hold together the ever growing infrastructure that provides the mediocre apps to more and more of the world?

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#239

Post by 734129837261 »

I think Google is great. It's convenient. Their search results are tailored to my liking, I love Gmail, I adore Google Docs/Sheets, and there are tons of tools I use almost every day as well.

Honestly, the "switching away from [nameHere]" trend is so tiresome. Good job, you're a unique little snowflake now. You don't have Facebook, no LinkedIn, you don't use Google but DuckDuckGo, and you're even switching away from GitHub now it's owned by Microsoft.

What's next? No more StackOverflow? No more using that popular package manager and, instead, installing all that stuff manually?

Why aren't you a sheep, using Linux like all those others. If you want true anonimity and control you build your own OS. And all those microchips are scary, better reinvent the entire computer just because they might track and trace you.

Where do you draw the line?

You're making life harder on yourself.

But okay, privacy is a thing. Right. Yet you're using a computer. Most of you won't be on a VPN every single day. And those who are, are probably on a commercial VPN. Or worse, a free VPN. Because if the service isn't the product... who is? Hmmmmmm.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#240

Post by _evzi »

aftbit wrote: post #227

Google Voice is the hardest service for me to replace. I don't see any alternatives on this list. I appreciate that they let me seamlessly send and receive calls and texts from my Android phone or my desktop. I have a hard requirement that my phone should be optional for all parts of my communication workflow.

You got me curious (I don't use Google Voice, but my dad has for a very long time) and I started to search around. It looks like all the alternatives are either expensive or shitty. :/

Edit: The universally accepted "best" seems to be Grasshopper[1] which is $29/mo or $26/mo billed annually ($312/yr).

[1] https://signup.grasshopper.com/plans

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