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No More Google

nomoregoogle.com

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Re: No More Google

#271

Post by rovr138 »

thesuitonym wrote: post #267
Normal_gaussian wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wonder if all the people leaving Google for Fastmail will make Fastmail the next Google. It's better to diversify accounts like that, especially in the case of email, which (currently) works across providers, despite attempts by Google and Protonmail to lock users in.

Get a domain, set MX records to a provider and back them up.

Worst case, you point MX to a new platform or server you own and restore from your backup.

Re: No More Google

#272

Post by Wowfunhappy »

bntyhntr wrote: post #223
jagged-chisel wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personal anecdote, software engineer/techie for 25+yrs: I never react immediately. Unless directly affected by an event, I accumulate information over time and it will influence my decision making. Reacting is too disruptive to my own life, and those of the people I support (e.g. family.) Would an article like this make my family change? No. Many don't care; most don't understand the impact on themselves. My De-Googl…

I've also moved to firefox across all my devices. I don't use electron apps. I use google search and gmail both personally and at work. I'm not really _trying_ to degooglify, I'm just degooglifying when the chance comes up. I'm also not hardcore enough to switch over the email on all my accounts, the people who contact me, etc. And I like free things. So one step at a random time it is.

I don't like Electron either, but is it correct to consider it a Google product? I'm not sure.

Electron is heavily dependent on code developed and maintained by Google, but then so is Node, and Go, and presumably anything written in Go, such as Docker. Calling all of those Google products seems wrong—but it's true that Node would be in big trouble if Google suddenly stopped maintaining Chrome or something.

Re: No More Google

#273

Post by tpxl »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #201
pgt wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

people keep trotting out this old story of Google kills products but it hasn't happened in years. Yes they killed some niche products years ago - social network/chat and an rss reader.. but the important stuff with huge user bases is stable. gmail, chrome, calendar, maps, docs have never been shutdown and likely never will until the entire tech world changes drastically.

>maps

Maps suffered from a nice 100+ times price hike a few years ago and killed plenty of companies that relied on it. I'm currently using maps because it's the most reliable and the product can afford it, but I'll switch to something else as soon as possible. I'm working on getting the local government to sponsor an effort to improve Open Street Maps enough to be better than google.

Re: No More Google

#274

Post by bleepblorp »

mxuribe wrote: post #214
blunte wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'm running a test with paid zoho currently (been going for a few months) to see if they're dependable. I bought a test domain name, and signed with their $1 USD/month plan...so far, quite good. I'm somewhat sold...the only reason i haven't taken the plunge yet is i've been distracted at work, so haven't planned out my migration. (i have so much email that i want to plan this delicately.)

I've been using paid Zoho mail for about eight months and have very few complaints.

I haven't had any problems with outbound deliverability. However, their inbound post-delivery spam controls are overzealous and categorize almost all mail from new correspondents as spam.

The only major problem with Zoho is that they host mail inside US jurisdiction so it's vulnerable to NSA abuses.

Mailbox.org (based in Germany) is a possible alternative for people who want/need to keep their data further away from American commercial espionage operations.

Re: No More Google

#275

Post by thesuitonym »

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…

As you're seeing, it doesn't have to be an all or nothing switch to degoogle. I stopped using Chrome and search ages ago. About two years ago I switched away from Gmail (NOT to Fastmail!)

Just about the only Google services I still rely on are Android (Because you can't get an iPhone with a physical keyboard) and Drive, and even that I only use because it's the path of least resistance for syncing my password keychain.

Re: No More Google

#276

Post by actuator »

macspoofing wrote: post #226
supernova87a wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does the attaching of 100s of files trigger an account lockout?

Why indeed.

I don't know anything about this but being an engineer myself I am assuming you hit a rate limiting function.

I am assuming Gmail caches the images when you upload, image upload being an expensive operation per se; when you uploaded so many at once, it must have triggered a rate limiting mechanism which stopped requests from you until the cooldown window kicked in.

Why would they add a rate limiting method? It makes sense for every product to have rate limiting beyond fair use, otherwise it makes it susceptible to denial of service attacks by attacking expensive APIs with high volume.

Why did the rate limiting mechanism blanket limited Gmail? I am assuming they either just have a global threshold or you breached both API and global threshold at the same time.

Should they have informed you? Maybe the message was in HTTP code.

Again, no way for me to verify this. These are just my assumptions from building rate limiting solutions in the past. Every service should have rate limiting mechanism, probably with better user messaging I guess.

Re: No More Google

#277

Post by the_other »

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…

As another poster says, these things build over time.

Lists like these are excellent for people who havn’t come across or had time to look for other services yet. Maybe they were stuck thinking “it’s too hard to leave google, I’d have to make all that stuff by myself” (or the corporate equivalent for things like analytics).

In my case, it took several years of posts, paranoia and planning. I tried out a few services. I already used Safari (Apple’s another story). I switch to Firefox as my main front-end dev tool, which took some getting used to. I already had a vanity domain name and some for of email hosting. At one point I decided to flick a switch and stop using as many Google things as possible. Some time later I got sucked back into GSuite because of work and some of my hobby/social life projects. When I start my own projects, I don’t use Google.

Re: No More Google

#278

Post by transcriptase »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #201
pgt wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

people keep trotting out this old story of Google kills products but it hasn't happened in years. Yes they killed some niche products years ago - social network/chat and an rss reader.. but the important stuff with huge user bases is stable. gmail, chrome, calendar, maps, docs have never been shutdown and likely never will until the entire tech world changes drastically.

Google Finance was 'renovated' and went from a robust portfolio tracking and stock charting tool to a relatively useless news aggregator.

Re: No More Google

#279

Post by JKCalhoun »

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 stopped using their search engine a year ago. That and YouTube were the only Google products I use (still use YouTube, so....).

Re: No More Google

#280

Post by toomuchtodo »

ivank wrote: post #220
toomuchtodo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved my Google Voice number to OpenPhone [1] (YC S18). No relation besides being a paid ($10/month) customer. If you have T-Mobile in the US, they have a similar offering called DIGITS [2] you might try (although OpenPhone offers more features for the price). [1] https://www.openphone.co [2] https://www.t-mobile.com/offers/t-mobile-digits

I signed up for OpenPhone just now, but then noticed that the only thing you need to log in to someone's account is their email and a 6 digit code emailed to their account. There are no password or 2FA options. I haven't tested how rate-limited the login attempts are, but it seems like too much to ask for customers to trust that they exist and work, especially when the apparent attack success probability is already >…

Your access to your email account is your password (magic link-esq). Agreed that 2FA is desirable (not sure if it's on their roadmap, will have to ping them and ask). If 2FA is a hard requirement, building your own solution on top of Twilio is preferable (as they require 2FA).
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