It would be interesting to add up the monthly fees for the top alternatives and see how much it would cost to completely replace google. Just the first few items already put you in the mid double-digits per month.
No More Google
321–330 of 400 posts
Re: No More Google
#322The issue here is ecosystem. Googles advantage is everything syncs together across there platform seamlessly. Going the no google routes fragments my ability to share photos, share docs and sheets, access easily across platforms.The trade off is being locked out and tracking (which you can limit in privacy settings). Edit: also want to add that there is also a risk with using smaller platforms as they have a high cha…
Google's making it harder for me to share photos nowadays. Instead of just sending the picture, it sends a link to a website with the photo
Install SolidExplorer or similar, share the photo, select SolidExplorer (or any other file explorer) and it's downloaded. From there you can share it anywhere else. It's one more step in the middle though - and it's the reason why I have migrated all of my photos away from Google and to a RPi4 with NextCloud and 7 TB hd.
Re: No More Google
#323These 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…
That’s true, but I’ve noticed a significant drop in interest for any new Google products. It may not affect their bottom line, but the hype that led to waiting lists for Google Wave or rapid trial adoption of G+ is over.
Re: No More Google
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
Discovery aside (not a big deal for me personally, most recent recommendations have come from HN & channels I already watched) you can just 'subscribe' with some other tool, and download or watch on youtubenocookie, or just use the site not logged in? I suppose it just depends what you're trying to achieve by 'degoogling'.
That works, but wouldn't for me. Discovery is precisely the primary service YouTube does for me. I really only ever click around the top two rows on the main page, all automatic YouTube suggestions. They are relevant and interesting enough for this to work consistently.
Interesting. Mine are awful, spam-level awful. (Even when I had an account and subscriptions.)
But I think my point stands - recommendations don't actually need any network effect, or to be done by YouTube itself. You could have a third-party/OSS recommender, it's just pretty niche and probably doesn't exist.
IMO YouTube can be used as a dumb content store. It's on the creator side that it has the 'network effect' handcuffs - it's the content store everyone goes to, so if you make content, it's where you need to store it।
Re: No More Google
#325These 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'm getting there, plus old enough that FB and twitter never made any impression. Google apps is hard to cut off when you have school age kids though.
Re: No More Google
#326Seeing Notion ranked so highly makes me wonder what other people do that's so different from me. I try to like it (I was an early paid adopter, and now my company uses it so I must too), but there are so many points of friction that most of my effort is spent fighting it rather than using it. Does the general typing latency not bother people? There's a noticeable delay between pressing a key and seeing a character ap…
I'm not sure how close can it get, but ONLYOFFICE products have been good to me so far. AGLPv3, good docx / xlsx compatibility, free for personal and there are paid business plans. They use Google Analytics though, boo.
I've seen ONLYOFFICE used on Nextcloud instances and I haven't seen Google Analytics loaded up. Do they provided a cloud/hosted version that has it? But agreed - I was impressed with ONLYOFFICE.
Re: No More Google
#327These 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'd already switched to Firefox and DDG.
I took the plunge and switched to Fastmail recently. They've done amazing work to make that as quick and easy as possible - in about an hour, they'd imported all my mail, and I had all of my email clients set up again.
I'm mostly off Google services now, but I haven't found a good replacement for Google Maps. I've had Apple lead me into the woods one too many times to really be willing to trust it.
Re: No More Google
#328Earlier 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 looked at Fastmail at the time, but there was one showstopper which I forget (and should revisit). Was it Australia's anti-encryption law? https://www.itnews.com.au/news/fastmail-loses-customers-face...
I'm about 98% ready to leap off Gmail for good and I was going to consider Fastmail but unfortunately won't, due to this.
The ones I'm considering are Microsoft 365, Protonmail, Tutanota and Posteo. Seems tough to pick between them. For me, the most important things are:
* Catchall * Multiple custom domains (Protonmail charges for each additional?) * Desktop app support (Protonmail has the bridge but apparently it doesn't work all that well) * Easy (or at least reasonable) to import my email history from Gmail into the new provider either via Download->archive->Upload (Microsoft 365) or direct migration (Fastmail).
Argh.
This is an interesting nut to crack. I'd be willing to bet there's a SaaS space here for someone who can figure it out.
Re: No More Google
#329These 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'd already switched to Firefox and DDG. I took the plunge and switched to Fastmail recently. They've done amazing work to make that as quick and easy as possible - in about an hour, they'd imported all my mail, and I had all of my email clients set up again. I'm mostly off Google services now, but I haven't found a good replacement for Google Maps. I've had Apple lead me into the woods one too many times to really b…
> I've had Apple lead me into the woods one too many times to really be willing to trust it.
This reflects my experience as well. It's usually correct but when it's wrong it's really wrong.
In a thread about getting off Google, I'm also getting off Apple. I just finished killing iCloud and now have all my backups etc in OneDrive.
At least with OneDrive, I have cross platform support and it's easy to sync and upload/download and I know where my data is. Apple, who knows. It took 2 days and 95% of that time was getting my data out of iCloud.
Ultimately I want my device to basically be a dumb view into whatever accounts I have set up. Sick of the lock in and "ecosystem".
Re: No More Google
#330These 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've been with Google since the gmail beta and have slowly de-googled a lot of the stuff I use. Not due to privacy concerns but simply due to them cancelling products or making existing products worse (gTalk/Hangouts closure as well as Google Photos/Drive decoupling were the two big ones). I now use Fastmail with my own domain and I love it. I also use Firefox which is pretty much back to being the best browser after…
> I use OneDrive instead of Drive (I get 1TB thanks to the Office family plan), which is ok.
I just moved everything out of G Drive and iCloud and all of it into OneDrive. Super happy. Might look at Nextcloud or Carbonite though.