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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

#271

Post by jabirali »

jszymborski wrote: post #161
lrissman wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can also try SyncThing, which works in a similar manner, but it's FOSS and you can host your own tracker.

While I like Syncthing and used it for a couple of years, my experience is that Resilio is way faster for syncing large numbers of files (e.g. Git repos or large photo collections). Resilio also appears to be more easily reachable behind routers and corporate firewalls that for some reason block Syncthing. For those with an iPhone, that platform is also supported by Resilio but not Syncthing.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#272

Post by minimuffins »

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…

In short, because pervasive surveillance is a nightmare for a free society and you aren't the only person alive.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#273

Post by mastazi »

submeta wrote: post #56
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…

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…

> I tried hard to replace Google Search with DDG, but I have to admit that Google gives me better search results.

In those cases where DuckDuckGo is not enough, just append !sp to your search, this will tell DDG to redirect your search to StartPage which is essentially a proxied Google search (the results come from Google but you as a user don't get in direct contact with Google itself).

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#274

Post by bb88 »

i_cannot_hack wrote: post #253
734129837261 wrote: post #239

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…

> I think Google is great. I use Google's products daily and agree they are often better than the competition. But do you not at least see the potential for a problem when gigantic semi-monopolistic tech companies control major parts of the societal methods for discourse and discovery, while collecting personal data from almost everyone? Are people who worry about this so unreasonable that they are deserving of flipp…

> But do you not at least see the potential for a problem when gigantic semi-monopolistic tech companies control major parts of the societal methods for discourse and discovery, while collecting personal data from almost everyone...

Sure, that's called Facebook, and yet it's still around.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#275

Post by jabirali »

submeta wrote: post #100
the_af wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

My first impulse was to move away from everything google. I don‘t know much about any wrong-doings of Dropbox. Maybe I need to do some research.

There appears to be a Wikipedia page dedicated to this topic:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Dropbox

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#277

Post by Aeolun »

xigency wrote: post #85
Scarbutt wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hasn't firefox been defunded and likely to no have a future?

As far as I can tell they canned most of the Firefox teams driving new features, so that’s how I read the situation.

It’s interesting how those teams have finally been able to pull Firefox out of freefall, only to be sacked.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#278

Post by viraptor »

Scarbutt wrote: post #75
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…

Hasn't firefox been defunded and likely to no have a future?

They dropped some side teams, but the deal with Google that we thought wasn't happening actually happened a bit later. They're still good. They had future regardless, it's not the end of the world for them to run a bit more lean.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#279

Post by Guidii »

jrnichols wrote: post #250
nickelpro wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a history of Google de-activating accounts arbitrarily? I agree this would be a huge problem, but I'd be similarly devastated if my ISP stopped doing business with me, or any other email provider if I wasn't on gmail. True, if Google deactivated my account I'd lose a little bit more than just gmail, but any company I do business with arbitrarily cutting me off would be on the same magnitude of problematic. T…

There's the issue of them arbitrarily disabling accounts, but also what if someone takes over your account? You've lost everything at that point.

Google recommends two factor authentication to reduce this risk. https://www.google.com/landing/2step/

(Proper security is helpful with or without Google....)

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#280

Post by anonymousab »

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…

>Genuinely, why should I care? What harm is likely to happen to my life by sticking with Google, a service provider I find convenient?

Someone tries to access your account from a random place, or maybe an old camera video you uploaded to youtube gets flagged erroneously by some contentid or appropriate content automation, and an automated system locks your account permanently, with you forever losing access to your emails and files. And not being allowed to use google services ever again without breaking ToS.

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