Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life • Hacker News Board

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#601

Post by TuringTest » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 6:16 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #506

chalst wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made the switch to DDG as my first search engine of choice a couple of years ago and when I am dissatisfied with my DDG searches, I usually compare them to !g and !b searches and find they are only infrequently much better. I think it takes time to learn how best to query DDG. I originally started to use DDG when Google buried Google Scholar queries and I found using the !gsc query more convenient than working with…

I just wish DDG would make the bang options available as a button, so I wouldn't have to type them on mobile. Adding "!g" to an existing query requires 7 taps, versus just 1 for a button (!) I guess I'm stuck with Google search.

The current Firefox Beta for mobile allows you to store BBG bang queries as buttons, using the "Search engines" option.

Just define a search engine with the search string "duckduckgo.com/!g%20%s".

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#602

Post by LegitShady » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 6:20 PM UTC

woofie11 wrote: post #314

LegitShady wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Office has more functionality, without a doubt. File compatibility, privacy/compliance/security, and functionality are key reasons to use it. Google Docs, on the other hand, the things it does, it does well: 1) Works reliably and without bugs. Last Word document I worked with began crashing Word at some point. 2) Works collaboratively. Google Docs keeps docs in sync in realtime. Office 365 has enough lag to suck at c…

Excel is not word, but ok. If you need to edit plain text, sure. That's not a particularly interesting use case.

I don't collaboratively edit documents with people - I'd rather send them a version, take comments/revision, go through the comments and decide, instead of having them change the document text without my knowledge.

As for my use case I use spreadsheets.

I make spreadsheets that query databases and perform analyses and then spit out reports. Anyone with excel, db permissions, and the right db connector can use them. Google's version doesn't even have half the features I'd need to get it to work when I checked a little earlier this year.

The UI on google sheets is brutally slow and painful to use compared to something running not in the browser. Maybe I'm an odd case because most of my files have tens or hundreds of thousands of rows.

also, on point 4, I think this is some kind of computer tech bubble. once you go away from computer tech, google sheets is not great with people outside my organization because they're all expecting excel.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#603

Post by judge2020 » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 6:24 PM UTC

eyeball wrote: post #553

cube00 wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's never been a better time to get your own domain and take back control before it happens.

I bought a proton mail account ... but that probably presents the same problem. someday proton mail decides to shut down users. less likely I guess. what's the least pain way to have your own domain fronting an email service provided by someone else?

All services have arbitrary usage agreements and can terminate your account at any time if some automated system is triggered, or even if a human makes the wrong call.

> what's the least pain way to have your own domain fronting an email service provided by someone else?

If you're asking about moving from Gmail to protonmail, your best bet is to set up forwarding from Gmail and go through your most important accounts to change the email.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#604

Post by patrick451 » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 6:28 PM UTC

pineaux wrote: post #500

switch11 wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kudos absolutely great to see you do this I moved off Google after they started doing some strange things with our adwords accounts Anyways Agree with you on this -> The only google service that is really relevant and hard to replace is YouTube. Google's earnings from ads went down last quarter. First quarter that has ever happened They are definitely at risk of becoming Yahoo 2.0. The only thing is the immense amoun…

Why use epic and edge when you can haves Firefox? My experience with Mozilla has always been great. It might be marginally slower than chrome, but I don't notice and they have great features and it's open source

I have used firefox for a long time. Their continued insistence on forced automatic updates is quickly becoming a deal a breaker. Even putting aside my philosophical objections to this practice (let me update my software when I want on my own damn machine), it is exceptionally frustrating when those updates with forced restarts perpetually occur in the middle of the workday.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#605

Post by toastercat » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 6:35 PM UTC

tjoff wrote: post #472

toastercat wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they appeal to powerusers that probably already use a client like Thunderbird. :) However, their webmail client is just RainLoop, which you can find a demo of here: https://www.rainloop.net/try-now/ Also, they are currently collaborating with sourcehut to develop a new webmail client to replace RainLoop. For the record, I like RainLoop quite a bit and find it to be very speedy.

Sure, but as a poweruser with a surname domain I have to be considerate of all none-poweruser relatives that are going to be using it. So even though I'll barely use it at all I signed up for Migadu only so that I could have a look at the webmail UI. But I couldn't even get a look at it, likely because I have yet to configured my domain. But I will not disrupt my domain just to get a peak at the UI... Thanks!

No problem. Not sure if you noticed, but I mentioned they use Rainloop for their webmail, which I provided a link to a demo of if you're just interested in checking out the webmail UI.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#606

Post by Zak » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 6:38 PM UTC

efreak wrote: post #381

Zak wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Voice also works if you have internet access, but not mobile network connectivity, and it works while overseas to provide a fully-functional US phone number (you do have to use a standard paid US mobile number to set it up, but do not need to retain it afterward).

> you do have to use a standard paid US mobile number to set it up, but do not need to retain it afterward If someone else registers Google voice with that number, you're going to have a hard time. It'll be removed from your account, and you can't use Google voice without a US phone number.

You can set up Google Voice, then remove the number. You can continue to use it indefinitely without another phone number attached.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#607

Post by AndrewThrowaway » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 6:52 PM UTC

pydry wrote: post #593

AndrewThrowaway wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree with you because things just don't work like that. When Nazis came my grand father was a teenager. A lot of local chads believed in them and joined SS and did all the dirty work. Then when soviets came these chads were afraid that they will be prosecuted for murdering Jews so they did the only logical thing - joined soviet milicija. What basically made them untouchable. My grand father's brother ran a…

>What people should understand that this "fascist government" will be sitting in DC. They will not be sending somebody from DC to Minnesota because "someguy at gmail dot com" wrote something against them. How inefficient that would be. It'll be easy as pie. The data is there in an easily consumable format. The tools exist to categorize and find undesirables. Tools exist which can be used to rank you in terms of desir…

I both agree and disagree with you at the same time.

Yes, social scoring would be easy to implement. However for it to work you would need critical mass of people believing in it.

If you live in Minnesota and somebody in DC says that your score is low you can kinda just ignore it.

When you local milkman stops selling you milk because of it, then things get dark.

However your local milkman can already have "a score" for you which is even worse than that one from DC. E.g. not selling you milk because you are gay or have a green mohawk.

HN attracts specific technical audience who tends to see things from very technical (hard, logical) point of view. However what I want to stress here are "softer" things - how society works, how people interact, how they sell out, what they want to achieve with this etc. It is much harder to define and is much scarier TBH.

It might be a good idea to be nice to your neighbors, demonstrate only mild opinions, basically just "hide in a gray mass of people" before you start setting up your own email servers, degoogle yourself and etc if you are thinking about fascist government taking over.

For technology or corporations to betray you, you most probably be betrayed by society before that.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#608

Post by Zak » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 6:56 PM UTC

gonehome wrote: post #69

actuator wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it is easy to hate on big companies but how do you leave them when credible alternatives are not even close in productivity/performance. I tried leaving Macbook, but whenever I have tried the alternatives(even Thinkpad with Ubuntu), Macbook still seems to be at the sweet spot of life time ownership cost/performance. I do care about repairability, good keyboards etc. but I do have to look at things in balance.…

I have a MacBook and it’s great, I also have an iPhone. It’s the business model that matters to me more. It’s not a “hate on big companies” thing. In fact the big software companies usually have better security (google included) because they have some of the world’s best security people. I try to avoid companies that have an incentive to collect user information for ad targeting. Apple doesn’t have that (and they’ve…

I've found Gmail's automatic categorization and importance filtering to be a killer feature. Is anybody else doing that reasonably well? I don't want to have to set up a bunch of features manually.

I had actually thought of building such things as a startup idea before Gmail was doing it. Perhaps I should have; perhaps Google would have just eaten my lunch.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#609

Post by hotroddy74 » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 6:57 PM UTC

submeta wrote: post #56

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…

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…

Google censors it's search to make you read nothing but mainstream media lies. All the mainstream media are lying to protect the Democratic criminals and to keep everyone unaware of all the riots and violence being run by intelligence community, Democrat run cities with Democrat mayor's, governor's and city hall. They keep people in the dark about all the chaos and the truth so they can continue to blame Trump for everything making you all think everything will be happy with rainbows and unicorns again it you just vote the bad orange man out. Google censors everything so much it's ridiculous and unusable if you want truth

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#610

Post by tossthere » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 6:57 PM UTC

freediver wrote: post #574

I genuinly wonder - what does go through the heads of those 100,000 very smart people that work at Google, many of them reading this forum, when they read a thread like this? Do they think 'oh it is HN again', do they discard this as irrelevant noise, do they know something that all the people posting here don't, do they still strongly believe in their mission, or do they get a gut-wrenching feeling that one day it m…

I’ll be honest, mostly I just think that this is a very idealistic and naive reaction.

The world is extremely complicated and full of unfortunate realities that humanity just doesn’t have any solutions for.

There are people who can recognize that, and who try to do the best they can.

Then there are people who can’t recognize that, adopt an overly simplistic model of the problem and its environment, become convinced that there’s a simple and obvious solution, and then start attributing malice and blame to anyone who refuses to go along with their terrible idea.

I also think: “If they worked here they would know better.” The people here are by and large very good and thoughtful people genuinely trying to make the world a better place, and whatever negative feelings you have about how Google uses its power, if Google were gone it would create a power vacuum in the market that would be filled by companies that were 100x worse.

That’s how I feel about the mission and the morality of it all.

I also feel genuinely concerned for the future of anyone who would deprive themselves like this, as a vague form of protest that nobody ever notices, in the hopes that it might aggregate to something meaningful someday. That seems like a very ineffective and sad approach to living your life.

My own personal views, not Google’s.