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No More Google

nomoregoogle.com

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Re: No More Google

#391

Post by mickotron »

I have mostly degoogled by planning then doing a big bang. I wrote out all the things I depend on, all the things I need to migrate, the alternatives, etc. I researched the alternatives and made a decision to implement it. I then did it in stages.

Currently I use my new pixel 3a with grapheneos, no google services, fastmail + k9, ddg, cloudflare dns, signal etc.

I still need to sort out office suite. Collabora does have android apks that should just work but I am waiting til it gets into f-droid.

The one thing I haven't migrated is Chromecast. Once that is done I will be pretty happy.

Note that you will never be totally free of Google. You will still be subjected to google analytics, captcha, dns, chrome (and derivatives), etc. The idea is to be less dependent on their services, reduce Google's capability to harvest your data, and ultimately reduce their influence, power and control.

Re: No More Google

#392

Post by MagnumOpus »

Cyberspy wrote: post #352
bntyhntr wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electron is based on chromium and I want to give non-chromium based things a fighting chance. It also feels like a memory hog and I like running slack in my browser more than as a separate app. tl;dr nonsensical reasons that don't really stack up but I'm electron free so may as well keep it up

One of the reasons I don't switch to Firefox full time is that it (still, after many years) leaks memory. Use Task Manager to see how much RAM Firefox is using once it's been open a while.

It is unlikely you are seeing a memory leak, it is far more likely you are seeing caching. Using spare memory is far better than not using it - and if another app needs it, FF will free it up.

Re: No More Google

#393

Post by mxskelly »

charsi wrote: post #380
mxskelly wrote: post #179

Some weird ones I'm seeing: Airtable doesn't seem to be an alternative to Google Sheets, it seems like a much different application than a generalized spreadsheet that can do math operations. Vimeo isn't really a replacement for YouTube, it's fundamentally different in the types of content it markets itself as being for. The Google Docs alternatives all seem to be note taking applications (except for Zoho), not docum…

All of these can be a replacement in some situations. Vimeo can be a good idea if you don't care about discoverability and just want to put your video on the internet without self hosting. These are google alternatives not 1:1 replacements in all cases. Deepl.io (translation service) is a one clear replacement and also superior to anything else.

> Vimeo can be a good idea if you don't care about discoverability and just want to put your video on the internet without self hosting.

That's a fair point yeah.

Re: No More Google

#394

Post by neycoda »

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 use a non-Google browser for Facebook, and the browser does web searches in a non-Google search engine.

Re: No More Google

#395

Post by transpy »

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 became aware of the evil and set reminders in order to spend one hour every Saturday to google-detox. I think I will be completely degoogled in a couple of weeks.

Re: No More Google

#396

Post by PrivacyDingus »

nashashmi wrote: post #53
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 switched from Google to duck duck go. Switching other products is a little bit trickier. Alternatives need differentiation to specifically pick them and being not Google isn't good enough. Ddg has bangs which make it a universal search bar.

Your browser can also do the universal search bar: https://blog.mojeek.com/2020/11/popping-your-filter-bubble-w...

Re: No More Google

#397

Post by floydnoel »

sigzero wrote: post #281
floydnoel wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 for Zoho. I moved from GSuite for my domain’s email to Zoho and it was pretty easy and has been running well for over two years now.

How is the office suite from Zoho?

I've really only used their Mail application, and it seems perfectly fine to me!

Re: No More Google

#398

Post by dejan »

Normal_gaussian wrote: post #283
thesuitonym wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On this principle I was actually with migadu for a long time - only recently did I switch to fastmail. Long story short migadu are not trustworthy, they fail to assist support tickets and don't notify their clients of outages where mail was deleted - blaming the client for not regularly looking at their homepage XD. I did look at many smaller providers, I was particularly interested in finding a uk based one. Unfortu…

Thank you for your criticism here (offtopic though), but we have never had an outage where mail was lost. Where did that comment come from? I am sorry for that bitterness, but I don't think we deserve it.

I rather think the issue here was that your regexes which were supported on our legacy system were not all converted to the new system during migration. This was something we did notify our users about via email and our home page. Not sure what more we could have done there.

Nevertheless, that has nothing to do with being "trustworthy".

Re: No More Google

#399

Post by Normal_gaussian »

dejan wrote: post #398
Normal_gaussian wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On this principle I was actually with migadu for a long time - only recently did I switch to fastmail. Long story short migadu are not trustworthy, they fail to assist support tickets and don't notify their clients of outages where mail was deleted - blaming the client for not regularly looking at their homepage XD. I did look at many smaller providers, I was particularly interested in finding a uk based one. Unfortu…

Thank you for your criticism here (offtopic though), but we have never had an outage where mail was lost. Where did that comment come from? I am sorry for that bitterness, but I don't think we deserve it. I rather think the issue here was that your regexes which were supported on our legacy system were not all converted to the new system during migration. This was something we did notify our users about via email and…

Whilst this is high risk for a flamewaresque HN policy violation I'm going to attempt a response.

When a very important email never arrived I suddenly realised I hadn't been receiving email for two days. Jumping onto the migadu site I found a brand new UI with all my regexes gone and my email ingestion broken. So I patch it up quickly and send a support ticket.

In short the response to the ticket was: "we had a storage layer failure [...] we could not serve all the requests [...] The catchalls and aliases have been a consequence - hence no announcement" (announcement is a reference to me asking why I wasn't emailed to tell me).

Unfortunate things happen, I get it. However. When they do, notifying clients should be a high priority.

Combine that with some previous and subsequent tickets that were closed without resolution and I have a pattern of behaviour that is completely absurd for the provider of a vital service.

The account that given in your post is at odds with what I received from the support team - this is even more evidence to me that migadu is not the right company to be responsible for my mail.

I also feel its important to highlight your claim "we have never had an outage where mail was lost". When an email responds to a sender indicating that a user does not exist the result is the email being deleted. Many terrible systems in business do this silently. The fact that migadu allowed this failure mode without a mitigation (and in your example, deliberately) is assuredly mail loss. What else could be done? It could be rejected but still saved (bulk disk writes with simple metadata - anything) so that intended receivers can be notified which senders now think they don't exist.

Re: No More Google

#400

Post by dejan »

Normal_gaussian wrote: post #399
dejan wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for your criticism here (offtopic though), but we have never had an outage where mail was lost. Where did that comment come from? I am sorry for that bitterness, but I don't think we deserve it. I rather think the issue here was that your regexes which were supported on our legacy system were not all converted to the new system during migration. This was something we did notify our users about via email and…

Whilst this is high risk for a flamewaresque HN policy violation I'm going to attempt a response. When a very important email never arrived I suddenly realised I hadn't been receiving email for two days. Jumping onto the migadu site I found a brand new UI with all my regexes gone and my email ingestion broken. So I patch it up quickly and send a support ticket. In short the response to the ticket was: "we had a stora…

No risk of flamewar, I genuinely want to know your view, not defend ourselves in public. If we messed up, knowing where and how helps not to repeat it.

I agree we could have done that better, however an announcement was made via email and site, taken it reached you via notification address in account.

Nevertheless, my apologies on behalf of our team. We will take your criticism to improve. None of us were born doing this and we are learning as we go.

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