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Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

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Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#281

Post by minimuffins »

bb88 wrote: post #268
kevingrahl wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s an analogy I like to use for people who don’t care about privacy; Its similar to not caring about free speech just because you have nothing to say. It’s not just about you the regular joe who is of no particular interest to companies/governments but about those people who absolutely need it. You not caring about what they do with your data is totally fine but in my opinion you should care that they (in this ca…

> You can influence groups of people like never before. Swing Elections & change governments. Influence public opinion about literally everything to no small degree. Right, so, has Google done this? Asking because from what I remember the answer has been largely no, but I remember FB selling data to Cambridge Analytica in 2016.

Google has not directly intervened in elections as far as we know. Will they ever if we don't take away their power to? Only one way to find out!

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#282

Post by efitz »

I dropped Google about a year ago, with two exceptions: (1) none of the YouTube replacements are even in the same ballpark (2) Google Translate still gives me the best results for the Thai language.

My big problem with Google is that they are evil and in denial - they want to slurp up all the data about everyone and monetize it, but they honestly don't get why that is bad.

My list:

-ProtonMail

-Firefox

-DuckDuckGo

-iCloud

-Visual Studio Code

(edited format only)

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#283

Post by viraptor »

gabruoy wrote: post #57
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…

Newpipe has completely replaced my Youtube usage since I mostly use it on mobile, and it lets you save your subscriptions locally. Its actually really nice and imo superior to the dumbed down Youtube app used nowadays anyway. Freetube is the same idea but for desktop, but I've found it to be much buggier in using it, so I occasionally just use youtube in a private tab and directly search for a video on desktop, usual…

> Also many of your favorite video creators may already use services like LBRY and Bitchute.

Or moving to Nebula. Somehow https://watchnebula.com/ gained a lot of attention recently with maybe half of my yt subscriptions also publishing there. (Or maybe it's just my bubble)

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#284

Post by minimuffins »

nickelpro wrote: post #77
XCSme wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the biggest problem is Google becoming a monopoly, when you rely daily on tens of their services. Than, if for some reason, they decide to close your account or use your data to "be evil", there's not much you can do.

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…

It doesn't matter! Don't give them the power to!

There's a Richard Feynman quote from the Challenger postmortem: absence of a particular kind of failure in the past doesn't guarantee absence of the same kind of failure in the future.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#285

Post by dredmorbius »

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?

No.

"Mozilla signs fresh Google search deal worth mega-millions"

Moz will likely pocket $400m to $450m a year between now and 2023 from the arrangement, citing internal discussions held earlier this year.

https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/14/mozilla_google_search...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24156813

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#286

Post by bepvte »

mastazi wrote: post #266

For me the hardest part of avoiding Google is AMP, especially on mobile, where apps like Twitter redirect all links to their AMP equivalent by default. Does anyone know a good way to avoid AMP reliably on mobile? What I currently do is pretty convoluted (see below). On my iPhone, I use a DNS-based ad-blocker[2] and I just associate amp.* to 0.0.0.0 so most amp pages will fail. When the page fails to load, in the addr…

On twitter, im fairly sure AMP links are not hosted by Google. They use a standard developed and pushed by google but I believe the pages themselves are not served by them unless they are accessed from google search.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#287

Post by javier2 »

bb88 wrote: post #245
mianos wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I really enjoyed google inbox. Gmail moved a few things over from it, but what I really appreciated was archiving everything older than a month, because usually it was promotional crap anyway.

I also really enjoyed Inbox

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#288

Post by LegitShady »

woofie11 wrote: post #255
XCSme wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Microsoft Office really so much better than Google Docs in terms of privacy? Or is mostly just the "I hate Google, others are probably better" idea?

Yes. Microsoft Office is dramatically better than Google Docs in terms of privacy. I hate using Office 365 with a passion. The usability is horrible. Google Docs is much more pleasant. But in any environment where privacy or security matters, I'd pick it over Google Docs in a heartbeat. In my day job, I work with data with compliance issues. We use Microsoft technologies and zero Google. As obnoxious as Office 365 is…

What's so usable about Google docs? I mainly use Excel and the Google docs version is unbearable in terms of ui speed and more limited in functions.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#289

Post by nrev »

It’s interesting to see this as #1 just now. It’s a little tangential, I’ve actually been doing a lot of researching on the recent changes to Search and fallout that users have reported + some further research into my own anecdotal change in experience of Search results for the better part of the day; plus it’s something I’ve been researching on and off since the beginning of 2020 when I noticed a significant change in the quality of search results I was getting (I.e. trying to search for web pages, published resources that I know are on the web and that I’ve located with Search, prior, and unfortunately, having a harder time with that. Plus there’s some other UI/UX changes in that time frame, too). That said, I have essentially come to the conclusion that I need to pivot away from Search and find/use one of the other search engines or risk further diminishing return within a number of research tasks. :(

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#290

Post by dawnerd »

I've got almost 12TB stored in my Google Drive so that alone makes it basically impossible to switch. There's no other provider I'd trust with that much data for the price (G Suite). As much as I'd love to switch, it's just not worth the headache IMO.
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