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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

#321

Post by vlunkr »

bb88 wrote: post #274
i_cannot_hack wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sure it's still around, and anyone considering dropping Google probably dropped Facebook a long time ago.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#322

Post by RonanTheGrey »

tibyat wrote: post #258
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…

Your question is obviously irrelevant. Whether or not they have flagrantly abused the power is irrelevant. What is relevant is whether or not they could , how easy it would be to do so, how damaging it could be, and what protections we would have once they have done so. This is the threat presented by internet monopolies and their fetish for violating our privacy. Also consider that no company has managed to stay on…

"What do all men with power want? More power."

"Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

I feel like we have to re-learn the lessons of history every few decades. These things have never worked out well for us in the past and yet despite thousand of historical examples, in every generation or three, a not-small group of people arises swearing that this time is different.

Literally the only way to protect humanity from itself is to prevent the concentration of power and here we are, doing it again.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#323

Post by RonanTheGrey »

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…

I wonder -

Do you wear your COVID mask? Why? How do you feel when others don't - or openly refuse to?

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#324

Post by RonanTheGrey »

judge2020 wrote: post #14
searchableguy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which?

[not op] Given that Microsoft/Apple/etc. aren't mentioned, G Suite has no real alternative other than Zoho (Note: nextcloud doesn't do email, so it's arguably not a GSuite competitor). This list would be better titled 'free/open-source alternatives to Google products' since excluding the other big companies extends past "de-google" and more into "open source living", if that's a good term for it.

Microsoft is absolutely a GSuite competitor and has arguably been in the space longer.

I moved most of my custom domain emails off Google some months back and onto Microsoft 365 and it's honestly a great experience.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#325

Post by zzo38computer »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #297
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…

Their search results suck. Are getting worse every year. IMHO.

I agree, although sometimes it works. The same is true of other search engines, although they are sometimes better, sometimes worse, than Google. (But often I don't need web search that much anyways. I have man pages, Wikipedia, books, etc.)

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#326

Post by vlunkr »

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…

This is a textbook false dichotomy. You're basically saying there are two choices 1) use whatever is convenient with absolutely no regard for privacy or 2) don't use computers at all and put on a tinfoil hat.

> Where do you draw the line?

Clearly they've drawn it to exclude Google, what's the problem with that?

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#327

Post by ryantgtg »

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…

A few months ago I started an Etsy shop, but I couldn’t create an account using a fastmail address. I got an “unknown error.” And the help desk suggested I use a more mainstream email service. That solution worked, and then I switched it to fastmail.

But this goes to show how basic the opsec is for some companies. Similarly with Twitter, each time I create a dev account for a bot, if I use fastmail my account will get locked 3-4 times in the first 20 minutes after creating the account (and not so with gmail). I’m not sure why they think that bad actors can’t also sign up for a Gmail account, and are more likely to use fastmail.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#329

Post by drivebycomment »

nrev wrote: post #289

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…

Do you have examples for "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" ?

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#330

Post by FullyFunctional »

the_af wrote: post #89
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…

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)

I loathe Google Docs for the horrible UX. Dropbox was great (modulo security/privacy) but they are increasingly moving away from what made it great (a simple file system abstraction). My absolute favorite today is Keybase (it includes cloud file storage too) which is the only of my options that I actually trust to be private.
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