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No More Google

nomoregoogle.com

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Re: No More Google

#51

Post by anonytrary »

This is a great compilation, but it sort of misses the point. The problem isn't that Google owns all of the services we use. It's that someone owns them and even if you switch to a handful of independent services (which is a worse UX), someone else is snooping on you. Google's value proposition is that if you're inside the Google family of services, each service is made better due to having a unified analytics and user profiling. This is a double-edged sword:

  1. A single service has full visibility into your habits
  2. The upper bound for the efficacy of each service is higher.
Is this worth it to you? That's the question you should be asking yourself.

Re: No More Google

#52

Post by wobblykiwi »

reificator wrote: post #42
colordrops wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't music one of the easier ones to replace? Spotify, apple, many others.

Not if your usage of Google Play Music is to seamlessly mix your personal collection (Particularly one-offs, local bands, bootlegs, parodies, mashups, obscure artists, older music, etc) with a pretty full subscription service. From what I've heard if you're on iOS you can do this with Apple Music, but that's about it. Everyone else seems to think their collection is good enough that you won't need anything else.

Google Play Music is shutting down. I haven't checked recently, but did they update Youtube Music to allow personal uploads?

Re: No More Google

#53

Post by nashashmi »

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.

Re: No More Google

#56

Post by jimmaswell »

redvenom wrote: post #27
KarimDaghari wrote: post #11

Honestly, for me, the hardest one to replace is YouTube. I think the best I can do is to create an account specifically for it + use firefox containers.

I think there is also a difference between lock in and just using a service. If your primary email is Gmail, it's hard to switch and it's worse than YouTube. With YouTube, if Google decides to lock you out, you can more easily move to PeerTube or another service. I also recommend that if you create content for YouTube, you also upload it elsewhere.

Switching from gmail and forwarding to your new address sounds easy unless you insist on deleting it and changing every account referencing the old email.

Re: No More Google

#57

Post by Dirlewanger »

Opera as a non-tracking alternative? It's almost entirely owned by Chinese interests. And Cloudflare as a non-tracking alternative?? This site needs to revisit some of its alternatives.

Re: No More Google

#58

Post by blunte »

Seeing 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 appear. Other apps, Electron-based even, don't seem so slow. But then you type something like a/b and you realize why it's so slow. About half of the things a technical person might type while writing notes or documentation result in some "helpful" popup which must be canceled. I have a long laundry list of usability issues, but from all appearances their company has been growing and selling but not making good on the promises of addressing feedback.

My team and I use google docs to get the initial collaborative concepts down, and then one of us manually creates a Notion page with the more permanent result. I sincerely wish to find a collaborative writing/spreadsheet/drawing suite that was open source (paid service even) that could come close to the utility of gdocs.

Re: No More Google

#59

Post by jimmaswell »

baxtr wrote: post #31
KarimDaghari wrote: post #11

Honestly, for me, the hardest one to replace is YouTube. I think the best I can do is to create an account specifically for it + use firefox containers.

YouTube UX has gotten really bad. I don’t know where to start. Auto continue eg or the fact that you can’t continue watching in the background on your smartphone unless you pay. But I agree it can’t be replaced currently

Background watching has suddenly started working for me on Firefox on Android recently.

Re: No More Google

#60

Post by yabones »

keyme wrote: post #14
Igelau wrote: post #8

Anyone using any of these email services? I'm not looking for a workplace product, I just want to be able to get myself out of Gmail reliance and gradually get my family away from it too.

The key is to use your own domain for email. The rest doesn't matter as much. Email is not secure, no matter what service you use. It is transferred in plain text between providers.

Security is not absolute. There are many different types when we talk about email:

1. Encryption in transit - Yes, indeed unencrypted SMTP is common. SMIME and GPG are not as common as they should be

2. Encryption at rest, server side - 99% of providers don't do this

3. Account security - supporting MFA, u2F etc

4. Application security - If there is an official application, does it store saved mail property (ie, not in a big dumb PST file)

So yes, somebody could sniff some plaintext SMTP email regardless of your provider, but the other features are very valid and important.

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